Caught in the Weavings of the Wheel
by The Gramarye
Summary: BtVS x WoT. Shortly after the destruction of the Sunnydale catacombs, Buffy, Faith, and Willow find themselves sucked into a world in which they might be even more over their heads than ever before, struggling to survive and searching for a way home.
1. Amid the Ruins

**INTRODUCTION:** Hello again, all! Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Or at least slightly exaggerated. Anyway, this is the first chapter of my latest project; I have about five chapters written so far and I'll use the reviews I get here as a gauge of whether it's worth continuing to pursue it. It's a crossover between the _Buffy-_verse and the world of Robert Jordan's epic _Wheel of Time_ series. Some familiarity with the WoT-verse is recommended, but I try to work in as much exposition as can be made natural.

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. As it is, I'm just a judgment-proof student who's likely to remain so because I keep writing fanfiction instead of studying.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

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**CHAPTER 1:**

** AMID THE RUINS**

The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, its name long forgotten by even its own people, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the vast crater that marked the tomb of the Hellmouth. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was _a _beginning.

Northward the wind blew, across the vast emptiness where until only minutes ago had stood the placid-seeming town of Sunnydale, carrying dry dust that might have contained the powdered remains of a home, a school, a city sewer line, a car, or a hundred other keepsakes of the former inhabitants of the town, human and nonhuman alike. Most of those inhabitants, warned by that deeply buried, animalistic sense of danger sharpened by long years in the wilderness before the comforting blanket of modern civilization lulled it to sleep, had fled before the destruction, but the dust on the wind nevertheless held the remains of more than wood and steel and stone.

Northward still the wind blew, toward a small group of men and mostly young women on the southern lip of the crater, who stood still and silent as if unsure of both where they were and where they were going, or if they should even believe what their eyes had so recently beheld. Blood stained the garments of most, bruises marred the skin beneath, and the shoulders of more than one slumped as if weariness had taken form and mounted a pack of stones on them. A closer observer, however, would have seen the light of triumph burning in their eyes, a light too bright for even the power of injury and bone-deep exhaustion to cloud. Even the injured wore faces of relief rather than pain; a few of the less scathed even dared to smile.

Buffy Summers was one of those fortunate few. She had been injured worse than many in the recent battle, but she already showed less sign of it than any, her flesh knitting itself back together so quickly and adroitly that within another hour, there would be nothing but perfect skin. Not long ago, her torso had been pierced by the blade of a Turok-han, one of the ancient, deformed vampires that had formed the legion of the First Evil on the brink of breaking free of the Seal of Danthalzar and wreaking war upon an unsuspecting world. It would not be long now before the wound was as much a memory as the creature that had made it.

"Hard to believe, huh?" a soft voice asked next to her. Buffy turned to see the oldest of her sister Slayers, Faith, who had inched forward to stand with Buffy at the very lip of the newly riven crater. "Hundreds of other Slayers ... and no more Hellmouth. Well, except Cleveland. But who cares about the Mistake by the Lake, anyway?"

Buffy allowed herself a smile. Well, she was already smiling, but she allowed the soft hint of a laugh to pass through her teeth. It felt like years since she had done that. It might well have been years in truth, she reflected sadly.

Faith noted the look in her eyes. "It's all right, B," she said, and then, wonder of wonders, wrapped her arm around Buffy's shoulder in a sisterly hug. The world was changed, all right. Faith had been many things over the course of her tumultuous life, but soft and compassionate had never been one of them. Buffy made no move to push the other Slayer away, either, which surprised herself even more. She had forced herself to be so hard for so long. So long. She inhaled deeply, twice, then again, but left Faith's arm where it was until Faith gave her a tight squeeze and drew away. The sound of other feet approaching had reached their ears.

"You realize I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life now?" she asked. "All I've learned how to do for the last seven years is fight."

"Maybe I'll open a club somewhere, and you can be the bouncer."

Buffy chuckled, and cast a glance sideways as Willow drew alongside them. Buffy shook her head, this time in wonder. If she allowed her eyes to drift just right, as though trying to look through Willow and slightly off to a side, rather than looking straight at the redheaded Wiccan, Buffy could almost see tendrils of white energy still surrounding her, lingering effects of the ritual her friend had used to awaken the latent Slayer spirit in every girl born with the spark around the world. Many of those girls would probably be confused at what was happening to them, but she had faith that she and Willow and Giles and the rest of the Slayers she had already gathered would be able to seek out the rest of her new sisters around the world. She actually savored the prospect of that; her duties at the Hellmouth had left her precious little time for traveling over the past seven years, and the idea of traveling to perhaps every country in the world touched a deep longing in her.

"Hey," Willow greeted shyly. "Crazy to look at, isn't it?"

"Can say that again," Faith agreed. "But I'll be glad to put this joint in the rearview and ..."

"Wait ..." Willow cut her off, her usual dreamlike voice suddenly sharp and crisp. Her eyes had gone suddenly distant, and Buffy's fingers tightened on the Scythe in her hands. She could sense Faith's muscles tense next to her, as well. There was a short silence, then Willow spoke in a resigned voice, "there's something still down there. I'm sure."

Buffy snarled a curse, but was already moving. Faith was only a step behind her. _Should have known better than to get my hopes up_, Buffy berated herself. Her feet found sure footing where there should have been none as she leapt from stone to stone in the wall of the crater, bounding down the rock face in strides covering fifteen, twenty, twenty-five feet at a time. As the slope began to level off near the base of the hollow, she leapt atop a loose, flat stone and slid down another hundred yards before skidding to a stop, the Scythe already raised to ward off any attackers, though she knew that no Turok-han would be able to approach her here, exposed to the harsh light of day. Faith drew alongside a moment later. Buffy spared a glance back up the side of the crater. Several other Slayers had begun their descent as well, though all were picking their way much more cautiously than Buffy and Faith had. Looking at the distance Buffy and Faith had just covered, Buffy shook her head. It was amazing what blood of fire could make one do sometimes; she could hardly believe that she had just covered that distance in under a minute. It should have taken half an hour. It would take a sane person half an hour.

Faith was looking around warily. "All right, now what?" she wondered aloud.

"Search and destroy," Buffy answered grimly.

A thick wave of red and gold leaves whirled to a stop beside them, and Buffy and Faith both jumped back to give themselves room and settled into fighting stances before the column resolved back into the shape of Willow. Buffy shook her head. She had seen Willow use a similar trick when her friend had been temporarily consumed by the darkness of her grief over losing her lover, Tara, about a year ago now; then, however, Willow's wind-form had been motes of solid shadow.

"Warn us before you do that, will you?" Buffy grated exasperatedly.

"Warn me before you jump off a cliff!" Willow replied heatedly.

"Can we just give you a blanket warning that if there are cliffs nearby, we're probably going to end up jumping off of them at some point?" Faith asked. Willow shot her a withering look. Faith smiled, and Willow shook her head helplessly.

"That way," she nodded to the southwest. That was enough for Buffy, who set off immediately with a purposeful stride. If anything had survived the destruction of the Hellmouth, she was not going to let it get out of the area. This _was_ going to be the final blow in her seven-year war with the font of malevolent energy that had lain beneath the town of Sunnydale for centuries. When she left today, she wanted to be certain that she would never need to return.

It did not take long to find what Willow had sensed, though it was not what Buffy had been expecting. She clambered up a short sandstone rise and beheld a tall cylinder of grey stone, still slightly buried in loose rock. It was perhaps thrice Buffy's height, and every exposed inch was covered with carved arcane symbols like nothing Buffy had ever seen before. Where it was not still buried under the rockfall behind, it rested on a base of white stone, with seven steps of colored stone leading up onto it: one each of red, yellow, white, grey, brown, green, and blue. Whatever path might once have led to the base of those stairs, however, was long since destroyed; the hillside around them was cracked and broken, and on one side the steps even ended a pace above the ground.

"Found something!" she called back over her shoulder. She hopped over the crest of the rise and down into the shallow depression that had shielded the pillar from view. She approached it cautiously, not sure of what might happen if she actually climbed onto the stairs, or the white stone base. She climbed around it, and even climbed above it on the rockfall and looked down on it from above, but it remained completely alien to her. It did not appear that there were any trails or tracks leading to or from it, but given its location, it was entirely possible that this pillar had lain somewhere in the catacombs beneath the Seal. That made it dangerous, in her book.

While she was up on the rockfall, nearly level with the top of the pillar, Faith and Willow arrived. Willow approached the colored stone steps with far less trepidation than Buffy herself had. In fact, she only gave them a cursory glance before hopping up onto them, before Buffy could do so much as shout at her to be careful. Nothing happened, however, so Buffy bit back a few choice words that she intended to hurl at her friend.

Willow looked up at her as though reading her thoughts. _She can't read my thoughts, can she? That would be so unfair._ "It doesn't feel evil," the redheaded Wiccan called up to her. Buffy shrugged and let herself slide down the loose rock and onto the white stone platform around the carved pillar.

"Hey guys, hold up!" a voice called, and Buffy turned to see Rona topping the rise. Rona was accounted one of the leaders of the new Slayers, a black girl of medium height bordering on tall, taller than Buffy or Faith, whose eyes still betrayed her youth and inexperience but whose body was rapidly filling out her frame. Unlike some of the other Slayers, she actually looked like someone who might be able to scale cliffs barehanded. A few paces behind her, breathing heavily and mopping his forehead, came Giles, supported by the arms of Vi, another of the captains by acclamation of the crop of Slayers that had so recently earned their first battle scars fighting off the army of the First. Vi was nearly as tall as Rona, but thinner of build, a dancer rather than a warrior, with red hair cut short and a face that still seemed soft no matter how battle-hardened everyone had become in the past few hours. She was among the oldest of those called, which had earned her some respect among the others, and had proven to be a determined and steadying hand off the field of battle and a fearless warrior on it, which had earned her far more.

"G!" Faith called. "Didn't know you were such a climber!"

"Um ..." Rona's voice was suddenly hesitant. "He's kind of not. We kind of just passed him down between us." Buffy suddenly understood the sickly cast on her Watcher's face, but she was grateful to have him there, and to whoever had had the presence of mind to speed his descent. Probably Rona or Vi, maybe both. Or maybe it had been his own fool idea. It didn't matter at the moment.

"Never mind!" she called. "Giles! Some Watcherriffic words of wisdom would be welcome!"

"Ooh ... ugh ..."

"In English, maybe?"

"English?" he suddenly lifted himself and straightened his glasses. "I haven't heard that language since I came to this bloody country." Faith chuckled, and even Buffy had to smile.

By this time, Giles had reached the rough floor of the depression, and Vi let him go, stepping away a moment later when she was satisfied that he could stand on his own. He was still breathing heavily, but looked all right other than that. She turned to Buffy a moment later. "We gonna be here a while?" she asked hesitantly.

Buffy looked at the stone, then at Giles, then to Willow and back to Giles. This wasn't something they were going to be able to figure out in minutes. She knew that look in their eyes. It was the look that only surfaced when they were faced with an intriguing puzzle that they knew was going to be a challenge even for them. She groaned inwardly. _So much for waking up in L.A. tomorrow._ "Looks that way," she called back to the red-haired Slayer.

Vi nodded. "I'll go tell the others to go back for the camping gear." She turned and vaulted lightly up the smooth sandstone face of the rise, Rona on her heels. They had packed the back seats of the school bus that had been their getaway vehicle with as much survival gear as they could piece together, though there would never be enough for the more than twenty Slayers and the rest of the Scooby Gang that had survived the battle.

Buffy turned back to Giles, who by this time had ascended the stairs and was circling the pillar, his brow furrowed in concentration. "Anything familiar?" she asked, not entirely sure she wanted the answer.

"It's no demonic language I've ever seen," he answered thoughtfully. "Not any Native American tribal signs, either, though. Or any human culture I've ever seen, either. But for some reason, it looks more human than demonic."

"I agree," Willow added. "But the First was here. I can feel it." Her eyes were distant again, as though she were looking at something faraway that no one else could see.

Buffy tensed. That was definitely not what she wanted to hear. Nearby, Faith growled a string of curses.

"I can feel it ..." Willow whispered, "its feelings are mixed ... excited, frustrated ... I need to study this more." Without another word, she sat down, cross-legged, facing the pillar and closed her eyes. Her breathing deepened and steadied, and the air around her seemed to ripple slightly, like a mirage.

Buffy opened her mouth to say something, but Faith's hand on her arm stopped her. "Let the girl work," she said. "Red knows what she's doing here more than us." Buffy gritted her teeth, and not least because Faith was right. Willow was far more than the doe-eyed computer nerd that Buffy had befriended in her first year at Sunnydale High. She was a sorceress with an international reputation now, even an interdimensional one; a vengeance demon had once actually tried to recruit her. She had been the most gifted student in a generation at Sunnydale High, and had turned her mind to the study of the mystical arts with a vengeance ever since their graduation, even when they had been freshmen together at UC-Sunnydale. She had even dropped out of college to concentrate on her arcane learning full-time, despite the fact that, quite unlike Buffy, she had been sporting a perfect four-point grade point average at the time. And, of course, Buffy had called on her to perform one of the most powerful eldritch rites ever successfully worked by a single woman in the history of the world.

"Tch. Fine," she grated a moment later. She turned back to Giles. "All right, what makes you think it's human?"

"I'm not entirely sure," the older man admitted. "But I think it's those symbols, more than anything. They look vaguely Sumerian, vaguely Egyptian, like they could be a common ancestor somehow. Older than either."

"Which would make them what? Six thousand years old?" Faith asked.

"More than eight thousand," Giles corrected her. "But yes. They look much closer to that than any demonic script, and I've at least seen most of those."

Buffy shook her head. "All right, I'm going to go scout and see if there's anything else like this lying around." She started off to the south without another word. In truth, she was merely eager to be doing something, anything, and it was increasingly obvious that there was nothing to be done here at the moment. Out of a corner of her eye, she saw Faith heading off to the east, likely thinking the same thing.

The crater was immense, larger than the whole town of Sunnydale had been, but there were several hours of daylight left, and Buffy doggedly used every one of them. She glimpsed Faith at a distance more than once, leaping from rock to rock, scaling smooth surfaces as easily as if she had had a rope to grasp. The woman was going to get herself killed, Buffy thought with a grimace as she vaulted up another slippery rock slope, driving her feet from stone to stone before it ever had a chance to start sliding beneath her. Aside from Faith, she saw nothing moving for the rest of the day, nor any other strange artifacts poking out of the ground.

The sun had dipped low behind the western wall of the crater by the time she returned to the mysterious stone pillar, and the little basin where the stone lay was already nearly as dark as night. By this time, Giles had been joined by Buffy's sister, Dawn, as well as Robin Wood, erstwhile principal of the vanished Sunnydale High and Faith's boyfriend. Or perhaps he wasn't her boyfriend, but they were certainly more than just friends, whatever the two of them claimed. Another half-dozen Slayers had set up camp there as well, Rona, Vi, and four more. Buffy saw that they had been somewhat resourceful in finding themselves camping gear; they had torn enough seats out of the bus that everyone would have a cushion to sleep on, at least. A single cooler held bottles of water, and a handful of backpacks, clearly meant for school rather than camping, held enough food to get them through the night. There were no blankets, but given that it was late May in southern California and the sky was cloudless, that would hardly be a terrible inconvenience. Willow still sat where Buffy had left her, the air rippling faintly around her.

"Hey there," Dawn greeted her as she approached.

"Hey you," Buffy answered. "Xander not make it?"

"Couldn't see well enough to make it down the cliff. Besides, I think he's kinda tired."

"Not surprising," Buffy mused. It would have been foolish to bring the entire party down into the crater, anyway. If she'd had her way, Dawn wouldn't have come, either; if there were more demons lurking around down here, the last thing she wanted to do was have Dawn nearby. The girl had picked up a thing or two from watching Buffy over the course of the years, and Buffy secretly guessed that she had seeds of deeper magical powers in her—she was an artificial creation of interdimensional energy, after all, despite the fact that she was also very much human—but she was no Slayer, and whatever powers might lie locked within her remained just that, locked.

The clacking sound of rocks dislodged from the far hillside announced Faith's return. Robin's eyes found her immediately, and he was the first to greet her. _Right. Nothing between them at all_, Buffy thought wryly. It would be the height of all irony, even insanity, if the first thing Faith, of all people, did with their newfound freedom was settle down, yet the signs were there, though Buffy still wondered whether she could possibly be reading them right. Faith claimed that she saw Robin as just a good lay, but he clearly had deeper designs than that, and from the warm way Faith returned Robin's embrace, she might not be as opposed to the idea as she said. Something had clearly changed between them even between two days ago and now.

"See anything?" Faith asked, when she finally drew herself away from Robin and approached Buffy.

"Nothing," Buffy replied with a shrug. "Didn't really expect I would."

"Me neither," Faith agreed.

Buffy nodded, and looked around for Dawn again. Her breath caught when she saw her sister ascending the stairs onto the stone platform, though she herself had stood on it without any noticeable effect. She still didn't want Dawn going any closer to it than necessary, however. The fact that Buffy herself hadn't been burned to a crisp just by going near it did not change the fact that none of them had any idea yet what the stone column actually did. She headed for the platform, Faith trailing her.

"Dawn, you shouldn't be up here," she said as she approached her sister. Her sister was standing close enough to touch the pillar now, craning her neck to peer upwards at its crown.

"Buffy, it's weird," Dawn said, completely ignoring the warning. "This thing, I can sense it ... it's like ... I don't know ... I can't explain it."

Buffy felt Faith tense next to her, and realized that she herself was standing on the balls of her feet, as though expecting to have to move suddenly. "Dawn ..." she said warningly, more forcefully than before.

Suddenly, movement off to one side diverted her attention. Willow was on her feet, the aura around her vanished. Her eyes were wide. _"Dawn, NO!"_ she shouted, suddenly launching herself forward. Buffy and Faith swung back just in time to see Dawn reaching forward with one hand, hesitantly, her fingers coming to rest lightly on one symbol in the stone, one of a set of eight circles within a larger rectangle.

Everything seemed to happen at once. A white mist swept upward from the white surface of the platform, swallowing everything beyond. Dawn's eyes went wide, and she threw herself away from the pillar with a panicked cry. As she did, her form dissolved into mist as well, which dissipated and vanished. Buffy got the impression that Dawn was somehow falling backward, away from them, in some incomprehensible way.

"Dawn!" she screamed, jumping through the empty space in the air where her sister had stood only moments earlier. She wheeled on Willow. "What happened?!"

Willow was still staring at the stone column, her eyes wide. "Oh, dear Goddess," she murmured. "Did anyone see which symbol she touched?"

"One of these," Faith answered quickly, pointing at the cluster of symbols within the rectangle. Each was a perfect circle inscribed with an arrow pointing left, up, right, or down, four piercing their respective circles, four not. "I think it was this one," she added, pointing at the one where the arrow pointed down and pierced the circle.

"I think she's right," Buffy added, trying to recreate the last few seconds in her head. It was all a jumbled heap of images in her mind, but she thought Faith had the right of it.

Willow nodded, and put her hand on the circle. Her eyes went distant, and she took several tense breaths. "Nothing," she said resignedly after a moment. "I can't make it work."

"All right, breathe," Faith growled. "What happened? You knew this was going to happen before Dawn touched that symbol, you can at least clue us in before something jumps at us out here. Where are we? What's up with this?"

Willow straightened, and breathed. "They were the same, Buffy," she said. "The resonance of this stone, and the magical side of Dawn. It's a portal, Buffy. The stone's somehow a connection between worlds, just like your sister, that's why she was able to trigger it so easily, without even knowing." She took another breath. "I think the Turok-han army actually came from this stone," she said. "Think about it. There's no way that that many vampires were created from normal people over the last couple of months. They had to have come from somewhere else. I think the First managed to use this to bring them to those catacombs, from some other dimension. Another world. We could end up wherever they came from, or somewhere completely different, I don't know. I think the First tried to use it to summon more, but couldn't, and that's why it was frustrated. Maybe it emptied whatever realm they came from, maybe it just couldn't reestablish the connection—maybe it got this thing to work once just by accident."

"Look, skip ahead," Buffy interrupted, though she really did want to hear everything Willow had to say. She just had more important concerns at the moment. "Where did Dawn go?"

"I think she went back," Willow said. "The moment before she vanished, she felt a lot like the outside of this mist just before it sealed us in. She ... I don't know how to explain it ... if this platform is like a raft taking us to somewhere else, she basically threw herself backward onto the dock as it was leaving."

Faith suddenly interrupted. "You know, Buffy, I think she's right. I can't explain it, but it felt like that was just what Dawn was doing when she vanished." Buffy nodded quickly to say she agreed. That almost made sense. If any of this could make sense. At least she made herself believe that; that meant Dawn was safe. Which meant that she just had the three of them to worry about now.

A moment later, the mist rippled and vanished. They were clearly not back in the crater that had once been Sunnydale, unless it had somehow been turned inside out in their absence. They were next to a pillar on a platform just like the one they had just been beside in the Sunnydale crater, but this one was on the high slopes of a massive, dry mountain. The fierce sunlight beating down on them made the southern California summer heat seem mild. Buffy walked to the edge of the white stone platform and looked out over the land beneath them.

In a wide valley beneath them, a great city unlike anything they had ever seen, unlike anything Buffy had ever even heard described on Earth, lay on one shore of a large lake. From the pavement on the streets to the heights of its tallest buildings, it was crafted entirely of stone, by some art or power that Buffy could not even guess. Every building was a palace, many stories tall, though many sat unfinished and many more showed unmistakable signs of battle, as though they had been bombarded with artillery, or sliced open by giants wielding swords the size of full-grown oaks. Yet in the middle of the city, taller than any of the buildings, stood a great tree unlike anything Buffy had ever laid eyes on, taller than the tallest redwoods, many of its branches blackened as if burned, yet the remainder glowing with life as though daring the desert to do its worst. There were people moving down there, too, though not so many as would be needed to populate a city even a tenth the size of the one before them, and it looked as though most of those people lived in a small village of tents, small in comparison to the great stone city beyond them, at any rate. The place managed to give the impressions of simultaneously being abandoned and bustling with activity.

"Wow," Faith breathed. "I get the feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

Buffy nodded, then something else, nearer, caught her eye. "Wow," she grated under her breath, trying to disguise the movement of her lips. "I get the feeling we're not alone anymore, either!" She had detected movement in the rocks not thirty paces from the stone, so small and silent that even her eyes had difficulty seeing it, but her Slayer-senses were in full battle mode once again, and when she saw something, she knew her eyes were not deceiving her.

Willow had not seen whatever it was, but turned and pulled the two Slayers together. Buffy was confused for a split second, but then Willow began to chant. _"Cloak of the Shadows, Cloak of the Night, shelter us now from threatening sight."_ A ripple in the air fanned outward from her body, rippling up and down the bodies of the three of them, and where it passed over Willow and Faith, they vanished from Buffy's view. She could still feel Willow's arm around her shoulders, but she might as well have been held by the empty air.

"Neat trick," Faith whispered from the far side of Willow.

"Don't let go yet!" Willow whispered urgently. "We'll never find one another. Walk to the base of the stairs with me." They did, slowly, and then Buffy felt Willow let go and bend down, taking three small stones off the ground. There was a brief golden flash around each for a moment, then Willow was handing a stone to each of them. "OK, these will help us find one another," she said. Buffy understood; when she touched the stone, a she could have pointed in a straight line to where Faith and Willow stood as surely as if they were sending up smoke signals for her.

"Nice job, Red!" Faith was clearly impressed.

"All right," Willow said. "Listen, the Cloak of the Shadows will vanish if you hit something—or someone—really hard, or if you get hit really hard. We just need to find out where we are, if we can. Don't start Slaying without good reason."

"I won't," Buffy replied. "Those are humans down there, not demons, anyway. But they saw us. Or one of their scouts did, anyway. I saw him slipping away."

"Then we best get out of here," Faith answered. "Willow, can you make these things into walkie-talkies, too?"

"Sorry," Willow answered sadly. "I was researching that, but not finished yet."

"No problem," Buffy answered. "All right, Faith and I are going into town. Willow, you stick around here and see if you can figure out a way to take us home." Looking at the distance down the mountain to the city, she grimaced. It was farther than it initially looked, though she could cover it quickly if she had to. She didn't want to, however; she had not slept since the battle with the Turok-han, and there was no telling when their next meal might come from.

Abruptly, another soft sound reached her ears, and she mouthed a quick "Shh!" to Willow and Faith. They were not alone. "Split up. Hide," she whispered to the others curtly. Thankfully, neither of them asked questions. Perhaps Faith had heard the same thing, and Willow knew better than to argue with Buffy's senses. Willow retreated onto the platform, next to the stone. Faith darted back and leapt over the back of the white stone base, onto the upward slopes of the mountain, her steps noiseless. Buffy glided forward and off to one side, off the path leading to the stairs, and mounted a small mound of boulders that gave her the best vantage point she could get, trusting Willow's invisibility spell to keep her hidden.

Less than a minute later, shapes began to appear, brown-clad men and women seeming to materialize from within the rocks. Black veils hid their faces. Each carried a short spear and a horn buckler, and two more spears apiece on their backs. Buffy shook her head. These were no amateurs. There were eight of them, and all moved alertly and silently, and they held their spears as if more than comfortable using them.

"What did you see, Mandein?" a woman's voice called out.

"Three people. Women, in strange clothes, even stranger than the wetlanders with the _Car'a'carn_. One of them might have seen me."

"It would not surprise me, Stone Dog," another woman's voice replied. "We certainly all did." There was scattered laughter at that.

"They were unarmed," the man named Mandein added, almost as an afterthought. Buffy grimaced. She had set down the Scythe before approaching the platform to get Dawn.

"If they were Aes Sedai, that would not matter," one of the others who had not spoken yet answered. This man's voice was deeper and sounded older, and seemed to carry weight with the others, as they fell silent briefly. "They would not hide if they were Aes Sedai with the _Car'a'carn_, and they could not hide if they were not Aes Sedai, or some new kind of Shadowspawn. None looked Aiel."

"There are tracks here, Daeric!" called another, and Buffy turned down to see one of the black-veiled figures at the base of the slope up to where Buffy crouched. Buffy's eyes widened. The face of the slope was solid rock! How on Earth or whatever world this was could she have left tracks anyone could follow?

"Comalin is right, Daeric," the first woman who had spoken said a moment later. "And like none I've ever seen. No Aiel boot made that, and no wetlander footwear I've ever seen, either."

"Sharan?" the one named Daeric asked, uncertainly.

"No," Mandein replied firmly. "The three I saw all had fair skin." Murmurs of assent from one or two of the others followed. Buffy tensed. Three of the brown-garbed fighters were already ascending the boulders toward her. It was a sheer drop on three sides of at least fifteen feet, but there was no other way out, unless she wanted to try slipping past the three climbers as they approached, at least one of whom could read tracks that couldn't possibly exist.

She grabbed the edge of the boulders with both hands at the best spot she could find and swung down. There was a small crag several feet below, which she used as a springboard to vault down another five feet, and from there slid a few more feet before vaulting onto the main slope of the mountain below. A loud clacking sound let her know she had not gotten away cleanly, however; the slide had dislodged a few loose stones, which went skittering away down the slope. The Cloak of Shadows held, for the moment, but there was no way the others could have missed that.

"There!" a shout came, and boots approached from many directions at a run. Buffy ran to get away from where she had been standing, and seconds later, three of the five who had remained near the base of the stone pillar came running around the edge of the outcropping Buffy had just descended in such a hurry, spears in their hands. Fortunately, Buffy had more room to maneuver down here, and quickly darted away, out to one side and then back up the slope. She looked down at her feet as she did so, and could not see any disturbance in the ground as she moved. There was barely so much as a grain of sand to be seen on the rock surface.

"What sand-cursed madness is this?" one of the women called, plainly disgusted. "I see nothing but sun, rock, and wind."

The other two had stayed near the steps leading to the pillar. One of them was Daeric, the man the others seemed to respect, perhaps regard as their leader. She did not recognize the others; it was hard to get a sense of who was who when they all wore the same brown clothes and black veils. Daeric was easily recognizable as the tallest of the group, standing a good six and a half feet. He also carried himself slightly differently than the rest, seeming more relaxed, though Buffy didn't believe him complacent for a moment.

"Get back to Rhuidean," he ordered the one standing next to him. "Warn Alsera."

Buffy grated her teeth as the other man nodded curtly and loped off down the rough path towards the city; Buffy doubted he could maintain that pace for long, but if he could, he would make it there not long after nightfall, if her estimate of the sun's position were correct. And if days in this forsaken hole were still a normal twenty-four hours. She wanted to go after him and do something to stop him from summoning help, but there was no way to do that and maintain the cloak. She could feel Faith moving now, but the younger Slayer was still some distance up the slope, on the far side of the platform. Willow was moving, too; if she had to guess, her Wiccan friend was standing not far from the top of the stairs now, less than three strides from Daeric.

Daeric waited until the other man was safely some distance down the slope. Then he turned to face straight at where Willow was standing. "Your clothes rustle too much, young one," he said gently, but in a voice meant to be heard at some distance. "You can show yourself now."

Buffy tensed, measuring the distance between herself and the older man. She could cover it in five seconds at a pinch, but the other man could cover the distance between himself and Willow in two, maybe three if he weren't quite as fast as he looked, but Buffy wasn't going to put anything past him. He was tall, and his legs looked more than used to action. A tense moment passed. Then, with a slight shimmer in the air, Willow faded back into view.

"Um ... hi?" she ventured hesitantly.

Daeric sized Willow up for a long moment. Buffy began to creep nearer, then turned to her right to see the three who had initially clambered up the outcropping after her returning down the slope. She also noted that Daeric displayed no particular surprise at a woman turning invisible and visible before his eyes. She could feel Faith circling around the platform now, drawing nearer as quickly as she dared. Daeric spoke again. "Forgive me, wetlander, but may I see your hands?"

A puzzled expression crossed Willow's features, and had her own been visible, Buffy would have guessed that the same could have been seen on her own. Her hands? Nevertheless, Willow held up both hands, palm outward at first, then turned them quickly, once each direction, apparently to show that she was holding no weapons.

"You don't wear the ring," Daeric observed. "What is your purpose here?"

"We ... we didn't mean to come here," Willow replied, uncertainly.

"We," Daeric noted, as if that had reminded him that Willow was not the only one who had arrived so unexpectedly. "Call your companions."

"I ... I can't," Willow said. "We split up."

"They're not far," one of the women interjected. "In fact, my guess is that they have a very good view of us right now."

Willow did not answer that. There was no good way to do so. Instead, she asked a question that was very much on Buffy's mind, and probably on Faith's as well. "Please," she asked. "Do you know how to work this?" She gestured at the engraved pillar behind her. "We didn't mean to come here. We don't even know where 'here' is. Please. Our friends are going to be really worried about us."

Daeric was silent a moment, as if digesting what she said, and when he spoke again, his voice was perhaps a shade softer, though he lowered neither his veil nor his spear. "Not even the Wise Ones understand the Portal Stones, I'm told. From where did you come?"

"California," Willow answered immediately, as if she had been expecting the question. She looked from face to face as she said it, and her eyes fell at the dull expressions she was getting in return. Buffy realized what she was doing. _Of course. If they'd ever heard of California, they might have given some sign._ Apparently Willow did not like what she had seen. It appeared that, wherever they were, California was definitely not. No one had even heard of it.

"Um ... the closest big city would be Los Angeles?" Willow continued questioningly. "In the United States of America?" She shook her head. "Not in Kansas anymore, no kidding," she murmured.

Daeric looked from one of his comrades to the next before turning back. "None of us have ever heard of these lands," he admitted. "But then again, I have only left the Three-fold land once, and none of these others."

"The Three-fold land?" Willow asked. "Is that this place?"

"Perhaps you know it as the Aiel Waste?" Daeric asked. Buffy suddenly realized that Daeric was doing to Willow exactly what she had done to him. The uncomprehending look Willow returned was both completely honest and the perfect response.

"Enough, Daeric," Mandein said. "How much longer will we bandy words here? Her comrades are still out there."

"Mandein speaks truly," Daeric responded, directing his gaze at Willow. "Wherever this California is, you are in Aiel lands now. Tell your comrades to reveal themselves. We do not allow strangers to roam free in Rhuidean."

"I told you," Willow answered. "I can't just make them ..." She cut off quickly. Nearly quicker than the eye could follow, Daeric had crossed the distance between himself and Willow, and his spear was pointed menacingly at her throat. Buffy swore that she'd stake herself if it had taken him much more than a second. He was even faster than her highest estimates. No amateurs at all. Now up the stairs and level with Willow, he towered over her.

"Strangers!" he called out a loud voice. "If you don't want your friend's blood on the rocks here today, show yourselves."

Suddenly, Buffy realized that Daeric and Willow were not the only ones on the platform, not if the sense from the stone in her pocket was any guide. She barely had time to register Faith's presence before an unseen hand jerked Daeric's spear aside, tearing it free from his grip. Faith's Cloak shredded like glimmering fabric rent by razor claws as she stepped forward and planted a boot squarely in Daeric's abdomen. She twisted into the air faster than a striking snake, her other foot spinning into the taller man's solar plexus and sending him tumbling back down the stairs. Then she was pulling Willow to the ground and rolling as a half-dozen spears flew through where the two of them had been standing a heartbeat earlier.

Buffy was already moving as Faith knocked Daeric out of the fight, driving forward, no longer caring about stealth. She grabbed a stone about the size of a shot put from the ground in front of her as she did, hurling it at the foremost of these Aiel fighters—she thought it was a woman—who had begun bounding up the stairs onto the stone platform around the Portal Stone. The impact caught the woman on her behind and threw her spinning to the ground with a grunt, but she was somehow on her feet again a second later, albeit gingerly. Buffy shook her head, amazed. She had put nowhere near her full strength behind that throw, but it should have been enough to take any normal human woman out of the fight. She had little time to spare for such thoughts, however, since three of the other fighters had turned to face her, more spears already in their hands. She could feel the Cloak of Shadows part around her the way it did Faith, an instant before she made contact with the first of the veiled Aiel.

She twisted aside the spear-thrust of the closest Aiel, who was still recovering from seeing her shimmer out of the air in front of him. In that time, she grabbed the spear just below the point, turned, and swung her other hand in a knife hand chop through the wooden haft of the spear, shattering it down the middle. The tipped end of the spear came away in her hands, and she used it as a club to deflect the leading blow of the next attacker, twisting him aside just enough for Buffy to sweep her leg up behind his knee and upend him, sending him crashing to the ground. She did not wait for the onset of the third attacker, one of the women, but jumped forward through the space the woman's comrade had occupied a moment earlier. The woman recovered enough to throw her spear up crosswise to block Buffy's kick, but the force of the blow was such that both combatants toppled, Buffy forward, the woman backward. Buffy kept her balance, however, and since she had been sideways in her kick, toppling forward merely righted her once again. She kicked through the woman's spear just as the woman hit the ground, the wood splintering at the impact, and planted her foot squarely on the woman's chest to propel herself forward and at the back of the others.

Faith had already downed a second Aiel, and as Buffy approached, Faith slid inside the thrust of a third, grabbed the man's hand, and hurled him forward to crash roughly into the face of the Portal Stone. That still left three that had reached the platform by now and were still standing. Willow had retreated around the far side of the Portal Stone, and the Aiel were circling it in opposite directions, apparently trying to get at her. One sensed Buffy's approach just in time to turn and receive her foot between his eyes; his head flew backward as though struck by a club, and he crumpled in a heap. Another made a lunge at Faith that might have extended his spear just an inch too far; Faith's hand blurred as it moved forward, grabbing the spear, and then her other hand blurred forward as well, moving even faster to grab a fold of the man's robe and catapult him over the side of the platform.

"Willow, get us out of here!" Buffy called, bounding around the Portal Stone to jump in between Willow and the last of the Aiel, though from this vantage, she could see some of the others that she had counted out completely lurching unsteadily to their feet. Man, these people were tough! Complicating matters was the fact that she really wasn't sure that she wanted to kill them.

The last Aielman darted forward, then back as Buffy tried to grab his spear, then forward again, this time forcing Buffy herself to dodge back to avoid the spear. Faith was there, however, spinning up into the air and balancing herself parallel to the ground against the carved surface of the Portal Stone before diving to tackle the man to the ground. Buffy shook her head. Where had she learned that? She turned back to Willow, and a gasp of horror caught her throat.

Willow was folding to the ground, a rough purple patch already spreading on her temple, where a rough stone little smaller than the one Buffy had hurled at the Aiel woman moments earlier had grazed it. Straightening from his position behind the back edge of the platform was Daeric, who must have circled around the raised base on which the Stone stood.

"Enough!" he called. "Look around you!"

Buffy did so, feeling Faith do likewise, and a hiss escaped her teeth. Up on the slope behind them, and on the outcropping not far from the Portal Stone, and along a low crest some distance down the slope to their right, more Aiel had climbed into view, all holding short curved bows with arrows nocked and ready to loose. There had to be thirty of them all told, maybe forty, and Willow was already down for the count.

"Bastards," Faith grated beside her.

"I didn't aim to kill," Daeric said, climbing up onto the white stone platform and giving a curt nod at Willow's prone form. "They will."

Buffy swallowed hard. She was already calculating ways that she could avoid that first volley, throwing herself to the ground, or doing what Faith had done and launching herself up the side of the Portal Stone ... she felt surprisingly confident that she could do that, somehow, despite the fact that she couldn't remember doing anything quite like that before. It would do nothing to protect Willow, however, and even if she dodged the first wave of arrows, there would be another, and another, from at least three sides, and it was possible there were even more archers in hiding that had not revealed themselves. These people were thick on surprises, after all.

She caught Faith looking at her, as if waiting for a signal. Abruptly, Buffy sighed, and the battle fire faded from her veins. She walked over and leaned against the Portal Stone in resignation. She hoped she had not just sentenced the three of them to certain death, but it was too late to think about that when Daeric began winding cords about her wrists.

* * *

**  
AUTHOR'S NOTES:** Let me know what you think! I'm facing writer's block in the middle of chapter six, so there's a chance I might decide to pick up one of the other projects on my drawing board rather than try to make this continue, since the general plot outline of this could put it in the length range of _The Summer of Our Discontent_, and I'd like to know if people are interested in reading this before I make that kind of time commitment. There are only so many hours a week one can devote to writing fanfiction and maintain a day job, and I seem to have picked up one of those somewhere along the wandering years since my last post here. 


	2. The Wise Ones

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there would be a Bang & Olufson home theater system in my living room. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 2:**

**THE WISE ONES**

Willow awoke groggily. Her head pounded as though a blacksmith had run out of anvils and had decided that her skull would do nicely, but she was alive. The feel of rope against her skin brought her awareness crashing back with painful alacrity, however. _Dear Goddess, I'm naked! _She was lying on her side in a tent, facing the wall, atop a thin mattress, little more than a comforter. Stout brown cords of some material that was almost cotton and yet not quite circled her wrists, ankles, lower thighs, and torso just above and below her bosom. The cords were much too tight to yield any wiggle room, though they did not cut off her circulation. Aside from the cords themselves, she had not a stitch on.

She rolled over onto her other side, and found Buffy and Faith in the same predicament, only they had been gagged as well. From the look of things, small pieces of cloth had been stuffed into their mouths, and then larger bands of material wrapped around their mouths twice and knotted off behind their heads. They were wide awake and glaring at her, though there was as much concern as anger in their gazes. If they had suffered any bruises, none were showing. She guessed that they had never been unconscious; had they been unconscious, their captors would never have gagged them if they wanted to keep them alive. And apparently, so far, their captors did in fact want them alive.

There were two others in the tent, both women, which was a small blessing. Both were staring at her intently, but at least there weren't any men. The first was only an inch or two taller than Faith, perhaps in her middle years, with hair that reminded her vaguely of Vi's, only longer. The other was several inches taller, and one could still tell that her hair had once been summery gold, though it was now nearly completely white. Both had emerald green eyes, near twins of Buffy's. There was nothing leering or gloating in the women's expressions. She might as well have been fully clothed for all the women seemed to take note of it. She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. This was their tent, their world, their rules. Anything she said could turn out to be a mistake, perhaps a fatal one. If they wanted her to talk, they would tell her what they wanted her to say.

"Daeric was right," the older woman observed. "This one is no Aes Sedai. She's been awake for ten full seconds and has not demanded to be released yet." The faintest hint of a smile touched the corners of the other woman's mouth, but she gave no other response. Willow didn't even think that was an insult, at least not one directed at her; whatever scorn the woman felt was for these Aes Sedai, whoever they were, not for Willow herself.

The younger woman clapped her hands sharply, twice. The fold of the tent parted, and a man dressed completely in white walked in out of the night. Willow gave a frightened squeak and curled up in a ball as best she could with her arms bound behind her, rolling to face the tent wall again, trying to hide her most intimate areas from view. The older woman chuckled wryly, once. "Perhaps she is not so different from the wetlander women in all things, it seems," she noted. "Handuin, water for the lady. She may have it as soon as she tells us her name."

Willow cried softly. "Does he have to be here?" she whispered.

"Handuin is _gai'shain_," said the younger woman, though calling her that was perhaps a misstatement, as she was younger only by contrast to the taller, grandmotherly one. She might still have been twice Willow's age. "He will not harm you. _Gai'shain_ are forbidden weapons, and no Aiel, _gai'shain_ or not, will force himself upon you, but _gai'shain_ least of all." She seemed almost irritated that she had to explain that, though her patience was holding for the moment.

"Willow," Willow said, after a deep breath that was more of a gulp. "My name is Willow Rosenberg."

"Of California, Daeric tells me."

Willow rolled over again to look the older woman in the eye. "Have you heard of it?" she asked, hopefully.

The older woman smiled wanly and shook her head. Willow wondered if the other woman had let that familiar note into her voice deliberately, just to test her reaction. If so, she wondered what she might have just told the woman. Something about the other woman's eyes told her that she didn't miss much. A moment later, however, the man, Handuin, entered the tent again. Willow forced her nerves to settle, despite the fact that a red flush was covering every inch of her that she could see. The younger woman appeared to have been telling the truth, however, as the _gai'shain_ appeared to pay less attention to her naked than most boys at the Bronze had when she was fully clothed, which was to say, essentially none. He carried a pitcher of water and a set of small tin cups. He filled one and held it to her lips.

"Don't waste the water," the older woman said, matter-of-factly. "It is precious in the Three-fold Land. Those who waste it casually are punished."

Regaining a little of her courage, Willow mouthed quickly, "Wait." She leveraged herself into a sitting position. Trying to drink while lying on her side was just asking for trouble, if these people were as harsh on those who wasted water here as they claimed, and from what she had seen of the land for miles in all directions, she had little reason to doubt them. Conserving water in the desert, at least, was something she could understand. The _gai'shain_ even betrayed a hint of a smile before he held the cup to her lips again. She drank as quickly as she dared; her mouth was truly parched, but she was careful not to let so much as a drop dribble down her chin. She only wished that the cup had been larger. This might be the middle of the desert, but there was a lake nearby, after all.

"You learn quickly," the older woman noted, with a slight hint of approval.

Willow held her silence, meeting the other woman's gaze. There was another long silence, and then the younger woman's face broke out in another smile, slightly warmer than any she had yet seen. "An interesting land, this California must be," she said, half to herself. The edges of the older woman's lips twitched, too, and she sat down in front of Willow.

"Let us see, then, dear, where to begin? I suppose I should start with my own name. I am Alsera, of the Salt Flat sept of the Nakai Aiel. I speak first for the Wise Ones in Rhuidean. My overexcited companion is Nandrys, of the Two Spires sept of the Reyn Aiel. You have already met her husband, Daeric, I believe. Appropriate, that she be the one to tend your injury." Willow's eyebrows raised at that. This was his wife? And she had tended the bump on her head? Well, whatever the woman had done, it had worked, so she wasn't about to complain; her head felt almost as good as new, though she still felt tired and drained.

"I expect that you will answer my questions truthfully. If you do, I may answer some of yours. If not ..." she let that sentence trail off into the air. There was no overt threat in it, but Willow got the point.

"I understand," she breathed.

"Good. Now, Daeric tells me that you three are all that came through the Portal Stone. Is this true?"

Willow nodded. Alsera held her eyes a moment, then continued.

"You know a weave to hide a person from view, am I right? It was you who wove the flows around yourself and your friends?"

"A ... weave? It's called the Cloak of Shadows, and it's an illusion spell. I've never heard it called a weave before. Though I guess it could be called that."

Willow wondered if she had said something wrong. Alsera's eyes narrowed, and she shared a long look with Nandrys, who gave the faintest hint of a shrug. "California," she murmured. Willow could make nothing of the tone of her voice.

"You claim you have no knowledge of the Portal Stone, yet you used it to come here. How is this possible?"

"It wasn't me," Willow said quickly, and she proceeded to tell what she could about the fight in the catacombs beneath Sunnydale, about finding the Portal Stone, about Buffy's sister activating it somehow, about the mist and the arrival in this Three-fold Land of theirs.

"These ... Turok-han," Nandrys said. "They are Shadowspawn of some kind?"

"I don't know that word," Willow replied. "But it sounds like it. They're powerful demons, creatures created of darkness, taking the lifeforce of humans and twisting it into something evil. There shouldn't have been so many in our world, however, so we thought they must have come in through this Portal Stone, so we wanted to find some way to shut it down. Destroy it, or seal off whatever world they came from so they couldn't come back to California."

"Dangerous," Nandrys noted.

"Not nearly as much as facing another army of these things. Once was enough. Too many innocent people were killed as it was."

"What do you think your friends are doing now?"

Willow was taken aback by that question. She hadn't even thought of that. "I ... I don't know. I don't think Giles—the, um, scholar that I mentioned—I don't think he could figure the Portal Stone out on his own. And they have other things they need to do, things that have to get done or ... anyway, they're probably heading to Los Angeles—that's the, um, greatest city in California—to get help. We have some friends there that might be able to do something. Maybe. This is way beyond anything any of us have ever seen before."

"Your friends would abandon you so quickly?" Alsera challenged.

Willow's eyes flashed, and she forgot her nudity for an instant. "They can't do anything for us just sitting there in the middle of the desert. They'll be back if they can. If they can't, well, that's war. And they know we can take care of ourselves."

Alsera chuckled. "So I've seen. Very well, I think I might answer a few of your questions now."

"Can I have some clothes?"

Alsera threw back her head and laughed. "I may provide you with information," she clarified. "Clothes will come later, if you earn them."

Willow grimaced. Well, it had been worth a try. She took another few breaths to steady herself. She imagined that she might not get a chance to ask more than a few questions from among the hundreds buzzing in her head. _Concentrate, Willow. Focus on what's important. What's important._ "Do any of you Wise Ones know how to work the Portal Stone? Or know anyone who can?"

Alsera and Nandrys looked at each other. "The _Car'a'carn_ used the Portal Stone once," Alsera said at last. "But only to move his party from Tear to Chaendaer, where you arrived. I know no one who has been able to use it to move between worlds, though legend makes it capable of such wonders."

Willow took another breath. "All right. Who is this _Car'a'carn_? Can I meet with him?"

Alsera gave a mirthless chuckle. "The _Car'a'carn_ hides even from us now, from his own people," she said grimly. "He has abandoned trust completely. Even the other dreamwalkers know nothing of his whereabouts. He vanished from the palace in Caemlyn, in the wetlands of Andor, the last we heard. As to what he is ... he is the prophesied one, the Chief of Chiefs, the Light help us all." She shook her head sadly.

"Where is Caemlyn?" Willow pressed on, undeterred.

Alsera smiled grimly. "Far to the west, all the way across the Three-fold Land and farther. Much more than a month's journey on horse."

Willow was about to burst out, _I can move quickly when I have to,_ but thought better of it, lapsing into silence again instead. She could think of a hundred more questions, but was having trouble thinking of any that demanded more immediate answers than any others. Suddenly, the looks that Buffy and Faith were giving her registered in her mind, however. Nandrys and particularly Alsera had such commanding presences that they had consumed her attention until then. "Oh ... um ... I know you said you weren't looking for requests, just questions, but ... um ... is there anything I could do to get you to un-gag my friends?"

A rich laugh shook Nandrys' chest. "A selfless wish, to lessen the punishment of another, but nothing would ever be learned by any who escaped punishment through the sacrifice of others. A while longer of silence might be good for their tongues, and will at least be good for our ears."

Buffy and Faith both made furious noises behind the cloths over their mouths, and Willow winced. Buffy had a bit of a temper, and asking Faith to keep her language civilized was hard enough even if all she was doing was ordering a pizza. Her eyes sparked, and she faced both of them levelly. "Calm down, both of you," she said crisply. "These women aren't going to kill us, and they healed me. I'm all right. Really." Buffy and Faith both continued to stare daggers over the top of their gags, but they fell silent.

"Impressive," Alsera noted.

"They were worried about me," Willow replied.

"It is possible to worry with dignity," Alsera replied. Buffy and Faith shot the woman a vengeful look, but if she saw it, she gave no sign.

Willow shook her head. They were definitely a strange people. "All right, last question," she said. "What are you going to do with us?"

Alsera grinned. "I was wondering when you were going to ask that. Unfortunately, that I cannot answer yet. Normally, those crossing the Three-fold Land without permission are run naked back to the Dragonwall, but of course, that would make no sense in your case, since you don't come to us from any of the wetlands. We would send you home if we could, but that may well lie beyond our craft."

Willow cast her eyes down. _Stuck here._ The thought was not pleasant. And the only person in the entire world who had ever used one of these Portal Stones for anything had been hundreds of miles away, could be anywhere by now, and had never actually used it to travel between worlds, so far as Alsera knew, and Willow did not believe the woman was lying to her.

There was another minute of silence, then another woman entered the tent, clad in a loose brown dress and shawl like the other two Wise Ones, carrying a small satchel. This woman was of a height between Alsera and Nandrys, and was closer to Nandrys' age, with red-gold hair and a thick golden bracelet inlaid with glittering red crystals. She introduced herself as Dainya, of the Cossaida Chareen Aiel, then turned to Alsera and Nandrys. "How has she been?" she asked.

"Surprising, in more ways than one," Nandrys added. "She never even tested the shield."

Willow was confused. Shield? She looked around. There was nothing resembling a shield in sight.

"Interesting," Dainya said, setting down her satchel. "She has been answering, then?"

"Willow Rosenberg has been giving answers," Alsera said cautiously. Willow was not so foolish as to miss the difference between answering and giving answers. They still didn't believe her. But they were still talking to her.

"Perhaps she might give a few more, then," Dainya continued.

"I will leave you to it, then," Nandrys said, and without another word, turned and left. Dainya took Nandrys' place beside Alsera. Rotating sentry duty, Willow surmised. At least they had only assigned women to guard them, and apparently only these Wise Ones, not the veiled fighters they had faced on the mountain above. But what was this shield they were talking about? She wasn't going to try to do anything to anger them, but that would be hard if she couldn't even see what she was not supposed to break.

"What did you find, Dainya?" Alsera asked as the other woman left the tent.

"If they are _ter'angreal_, they are unlike any I've ever seen," the younger woman replied. "And what the papers mean, I cannot say." She reached in to the satchel and withdrew Buffy's wallet, which she must have had in a pocket of her clothing. Her own personal effects had been in her purse, which she had left on the school bus, worlds away now. Apparently Faith had not carried anything of note on her person, either; considering the tight clothing the raven-haired Slayer typically wore, that was hardly surprising. Dainya approached and laid the contents of the wallet on the ground in front of Willow. "Explain to me what I am seeing here."

_Oh boy_, Willow groaned. This was not going to be easy, and not because she saw any harm in giving true answers or didn't want to give them, but because she had no idea how to explain these kinds of things to people who had never heard of them. "Wow—this could take a while," she began. "Um—just stop me if I completely lose you. Those green pieces of paper are what we use for money ..."

"You use green pieces of paper for money? Of what worth are these? Is gold so rare in California?"

Willow really didn't want to get into an economics lesson, though she had aced the subject. She had aced all of her subjects. This wasn't the time or place for that kind of thing, however. "If people are willing to accept it as money, isn't it money? With that amount, I could buy ..." she grimaced. "... well, not much." Buffy gave her an withering look, but an equally resigned one. Willow was telling the unvarnished truth. Slaying was not the most lucrative trade on the face of the earth, and they had fled Sunnydale without so much as a trip to the ATM. Others had gotten there first, anyway, she was sure; there had been pandemonium in the last couple of days before the collapse.

Alsera bent to examine one of the bills. "This United States ... you mentioned it before. Your nation?" Willow nodded. "And does this nation have so little gold that you substitute paper for it? Or is paper so valuable there?"

Willow blew on one of her bangs. Her first instinct again was to launch into an economic history lecture, beginning with the development of paper money and proceeding all the way to the abandonment of the gold standard, but that was probably not what these people were looking for. But what were they looking for? "The United States is not poor, if that's what you mean," she said. "But we use these—well, basically because gold is kind of heavy if you carry around a lot of it. At least that was how it started. Though gold was worth more than five hundred dollars an ounce, the last time I checked, so that's kind of broken down. But people would still rather carry around cash—money like this—than gold, because it's easier to separate. I can give someone five dollars more easily than a hundredth of an ounce of gold."

Dainya waved her hand impatiently, signaling that she'd heard enough. "And this?"

"That's a credit card. Another thing we use like money. It ... well, the principle is that it's good for a loan of up to a certain amount. A lot of our people get in trouble with them," she added, for no particular reason. "That next card is a driver's license. It—wow—it means that Buffy's allowed to drive a car. A—a carriage that can move by itself, it's how most of us get around."

Dainya looked back at Alsera quizzically. Alsera shrugged. "Such things were rumored possible in the Age of Legends," she observed neutrally, "more than three thousand years ago."

There was a long silence. Then, at length, Alsera straightened and spoke. "Perhaps we could find some clothes for the woman." She clapped her hands three times in quick succession.

Willow's eyes went wide. "Can I—can I have my own clothes back?"

Alsera grinned wickedly. "Take another look at your friends." Willow did, and her eyes widened further. She had not taken a good look at the actual fabric that had been used to gag her friends. _That was one of my favorite shirts_, she sighed. There was no help for it now, however. She groaned and shook her head helplessly. She ventured a moment later, however, "and my friends? Can they have their clothes back?"

Alsera chuckled mirthlessly. "Ah, yes, one final question. I almost forgot." Her tone made it clear that she had actually done no such thing. "How is it that your friends are impervious to the Power?"

Willow leveled a questioning look at the older woman, then over to Buffy and Faith, both of whom wore expressions as puzzled as Willow's own. "What power?" she asked.

Suddenly, Willow felt something invisible wrap around torso and drag her to her feet, where she would have fallen had the band of unseen, solid air not held her upright. Her eyes went wide. So this was why the Wise Ones were their only guards! She should have guessed when the Aiel on the mountain had said that the Wise Ones might know how to work the Portal Stones! Her mind had simply never made the connection. And what they had just done there—if Willow hadn't known better, she would have sworn that a faint aura of light had appeared around the older woman just before the air tightened around her, like something just seen out of the corner of the eye. She saw Buffy and Faith both struggling furiously in their bonds now.

Alsera's eyes were ice again. "Do not," she snapped. Her voice had lost even the hints of compassion of moments earlier, and Willow would have backed away a step had she been able. "Do not play coy with me. You know of the Power. You admitted as much."

"I did?"

"Your Cloak of Shadows."

Willow's mind raced. She had no idea what they were talking about with this Power, but apparently it was whatever was the source of magic in this world, at least as far as these Wise Ones knew. They thought she was using the Power when she wove the Cloak of Shadows. And that Buffy and Faith were immune to it! But nothing of the kind had ever been the case on Earth—Buffy and Faith had both been hit by spells before. She winced. She had hit Buffy with more than a few spells of her own during her brief stint on the dark side.

"I—I don't know," she said at last. "I don't think the power I use is the Power you do."

Suddenly, with a soft but sharp ripping sound, the bonds holding Buffy gave way, fibers tearing lengthwise as though snapped taut beyond their endurance by a great weight dropped from the top of a building. With a muffled snarl, muffled because she did not dare even take a moment to remove the gag, the summer-haired Slayer launched herself at the Wise Ones.

Only the fact that Buffy was still a little tangled in the ropes, and perhaps was a little stiff from so long confined, gave Willow the slightest chance to react. "_Enstricta!"_ she chanted, and Buffy's figure went stiff. The Wise Ones suddenly swung back to face her. Alsera's eyes were still icy, but there was a faint hint of wonder there as well. Dainya's control over her features slipped even more; the copper-haired woman's expression slipped for a moment into complete astonishment before she regained her composure. Willow filed that away to ponder later, but otherwise ignored them for the moment. "Buffy, no, I'm fine, really, I'm fine, they didn't hurt me, I promise." She would have held out a placating hand, but her arms were still cinched behind her back.

The tent flaps parted, and two more Wise Ones strode in, Nandrys and another, a pale-skinned woman nearly as tall as Alsera, with bleached blond hair so light it might as well have been white, though she was younger than even Dainya by at least a decade. They both wore wary expressions, and again Willow had the sense of both of them surrounded by auras, there, at the edge of sight, but unmistakable now that she understood where and how to look for it. Even without that, however, their eyes would have told Willow that they were ready to strike, and strike hard. Willow let her awareness spread outward, already nearly certain of what she would find. A ring of people around the tent, all with the taut wariness of warriors on the edge of battle. It was reminiscent of the sense she had gotten from the band of Slayers before they had descended into the catacombs beneath the Seal of Danthalzar.

"Please, Alsera," she said. "Buffy was only trying to protect me."

Alsera hesitated, the first time Willow had seen her do that, looking from Willow to Buffy and back again. Abruptly, she made a decision. "I believe I requested clothes for young Willow Rosenberg here," she said, to no one in particular. She turned to Willow. "If you believe your friend has quelled her—anger—you may release her. Be warned. If you're wrong, it will go badly for all of you."

Willow did not hesitate before releasing Buffy from the cords of power she had wrapped her in. Bad enough that these people had tied Buffy up, now Willow had done it, too. It had to be done, though. They would never have left here alive if Buffy had reached the Wise One. Willow was certain of that. "Keep a grip," she said firmly.

"Leave it," Alsera commanded, noticing Buffy reaching up to remove her gag.

"Do as she says," Willow added, seeing Buffy hesitate. "Buffy, the tent's surrounded. Don't get us killed." Buffy glowered at her, but let her hand fall.

Unreadable glances passed between the four Wise Ones, before the youngest, who had not given her name, turned and strode from the tent. Alsera turned back to Willow. "I think it might be best if we separate you. Your companions seem to fear your well-being more than their own."

Willow shrugged. "It's their way." Buffy drew another sharp breath through her nose, and Willow cast a pleading look at her. _Please, please, don't do anything stupid._

Alsera strode over to Buffy, until her face was only a foot from the Slayer's, as if daring her to attack. "If you attempt to leave this tent, for any reason, your friend will not live out the night. Nod if you understand." Despite being naked as the day she was born, save for the strips of cloth wedged in her mouth and tied between her teeth, Buffy met the woman's gaze levelly. She did nod, however. Alsera repeated the warning to Faith, who nodded as well. She then turned to face Willow again. That half-seen aura of light whirled around her once more, and then a shadow of pitch blackness descended over Willow's eyes, effectively blindfolding her. A moment later, however, she felt something pass through the cords, which fell away from her and into a heap at her feet. A moment later, she felt a soft woolen robe being draped around her shoulders. "Let her friends speak when we are gone," she said calmly. "I do not believe they will try to escape." With that, she put a hand on Willow's arm, gently but firmly, and guided her from the tent.

"Oh, stop pacing, B, if they wanted us dead, we'd be dead," Faith murmured, sprawled out facedown on one of the two thin mattresses in the tent. Buffy noted that the raven-haired Slayer was a lot more comfortable in her skin than Buffy herself was, though that was hardly a surprise. The Aiel had freed Faith from her bonds and removed the gags from both of them, but they had not given them any clothes, and she knew that they weren't going to be getting their own clothes back. Unlike Willow, she had been awake when their Earth clothes had been cut away from them.

"It's not that I'm worried about," Buffy replied. Curse them, but they had found the one thing that would keep her in place here ropes never could. She was sealed in the tent as effectively as if in a mountainside. More.

Faith turned to look up at her, raising herself on one elbow. "I worry about her, too, B," she said, comfortingly, which was as much a shock as anything that had happened today, "but I don't think they're going to kill her. I actually think they believed her."

"Really? Why's that?"

"I think if they didn't, we'd all be dead," Faith replied simply, and laid herself down on the mattress again. "Now if you don't mind, I want to get some sleep. You want to kill something, kill the light. I took down thirty-six Turok-han today. Good day's work."

Buffy shook her head helplessly, but then again, if nothing else, darkness would help hide her nudity. Gritting her teeth, she extinguished the three-wicked candle that provided the only light in the tent. She could still see the red glow of a campfire burning outside the tent flap, but the flap was closed. Wearily, she lay down on the mattress. She was tired. More than tired. She had been awake for more than twenty hours, through two hard battles, and a long march in the desert sun with her arms bound behind her back.

She rolled over to look at Faith in the darkness. Perhaps it wasn't completely dark, since she could see the outlines of the younger Slayer on the nearby pallet. "You didn't take down thirty-six Turok-han, did you?"

She heard Faith stifle a soft laugh. "You were down on the ground with a sword in you for a couple minutes. Spent too much time talking with Spike, too." Buffy shook her head. Was she that transparent?

"I still got thirty-two in short minutes," she grinned. The darkness definitely made coping with her nakedness easier.

"Remember, back by the bus, I said I wanted to sleep for a week?" Faith said, forcing the words through an unmistakable yawn. "I think I'm starting now. Wake me next Tuesday."

Buffy wanted to reply, but the moment she allowed her head to relax back against the coarse pillow, really just a pile of rags, sleep washed over her in a rolling tide.

Standing near the back wall of the tent, Nandrys straightened. She turned to the woman in white beside her, made a quick motion with her hand, and watched the _gai'shain_ trot off in the direction of Alsera's tent. Nandrys waited only a moment longer, confirming again to herself that the pair in the tent truly were asleep, before starting off for her own. They had spoken of two battles in a single day, and they did have the bone-weary look of fighters who had endured a full day of war, though the forced march down from Chaendaer could have accounted for as much of that. Certainly, if what Daeric had told her was true, it was not fighting him that worn them down so much; they had bested seven _algai'd'siswai_ like two rock-foxes loosed into a flock of chickens. Perhaps they spoke the truth. Their story was almost too incredible to be a lie, and the three of them seemed to great a mystery for this world to hold. The strange artifacts in the blond woman's wallet. The fact that the redhaired woman could apparently channel without seeming to embrace the Source, and could do so while shielded. The fact that the Wise Ones' flows passed through the two warrior women as though they were no more than phantoms in the air, yet the red-haired woman's power could clearly touch them. Had Willow Rosenberg not restrained her friend, the three strangers might have died, but she was sure Alsera would have been dead where she stood, and perhaps herself and Dainya and Charyn as well. Dainya had confided that she had nearly swallowed her tongue when the blond woman, Buffy, tore free of those cords; she had been bound tightly enough to hold a packhorse, and she had not just wriggled free, she had torn the ropes like flimsy unspun wool.

Perhaps they spoke the truth. Perhaps not. Perhaps they slept too deeply tonight to be touched by dreams, but if they did not, then the truth would come out tonight. Of that she was certain. At least, she admitted to herself, she wished that she could be.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTES:** Thanks for all the interest! I was honestly and pleasantly surprised to see that many WoT readers out there (as well as a few who were willing to give a new tale of mine a try even without being familiar with the WoT-verse ... quite the compliment, that).

_ellf_ ... I certainly hope I can finish this. The WoT-verse is so complex that it's almost impossible to do a short crossover fic and do Jordan's world justice (or at least make a valiant attempt at it ... could never measure up to the real thing), so this one should keep me occupied for a long while.

_Baalsfire_ ... the _ji'e'toh_ rules only really apply among Aiel, though some Aiel themselves are headstrong enough to hold them to it. Nevertheless, the Shaido notwithstanding, Aiel don't make non-Aiel _gai'shain_ and don't make themselves _gai'shain_ to non-Aiel.

_Velara_ ... thanks for that. The Portal Stones screamed "crossover!" to me the first time I read the WoT series, so that was a plot device I'd been waiting to bring out for a long time.

_Colpinky, Jen, Ariskari _... I'll do my best.

_PhoebeOtaku_ ... my apologies for your intersecting irises! Here's hoping for another "unlikely" success!

**COMING SOON:** Chapter 3, "What Can Be Learned in Dreams." Slayers have powerful dreams (even if this power was never very often brought out in the Buffy canon). The WoT-verse has _Tel'aran'rhiod_, the World of Dreams, with all kinds of useful, potent, and deadly quirks of its own. The Aiel have dreamwalkers.

Wackiness ensues.


	3. What Can Be Learned in Dreams

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there would be a little bit more Pottery Barn in this joint. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 3:**

**WHAT CAN BE LEARNED IN DREAMS**

Buffy stood in the tent again, though she did not remember even standing up. There was something different about the night. The candle was still out, but there was light, somehow, light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, as if everything in the tent, even the ground, had become just a thin skin over a luminescent mist. She looked down again. There was no sign of Faith. Her eyes widened.

"Faith? Faith?!" she darted to the tent flap and dared to peek out.

The camp was deserted. There was still coal on the nearest campfire that she could see, arranged so that it might even have been burning, but there was neither fire nor any sign of anyone tending it. Coal, not wood, she noted. Then again, they were in the middle of a desert. Tents marched as far as she could see in either direction, but there was no sign of anyone. No guards at her own tent flap. There had been close to thirty within a spear's throw of the tent when she had gone to bed, and more within arrowshot. She was certain of it. She was still hesitant to go outside, thinking that this might be some kind of trick to lure her into setting foot outside, with all that would mean for Willow. She swallowed uneasily. But where was Faith? How had they snuck in and spirited her away in the middle of the night? She must have been sleeping more soundly than she imagined; Slayers never slept very deeply. That was a good way to wake up dead. But for that matter, was it the middle of the night? What time was it? How long had she been asleep? It would have taken hours for the camp to become this deserted. Except that, but for the absence of people, the camp didn't look deserted at all. Everywhere she looked, there were signs of human activity. Nothing had been abandoned in a hurry. There was simply no one there.

_Dammit, I want Willow here! I want Faith here! Where the hell is everybody?_ The thought echoed in her mind.

"B?" a voice behind her said, wonderingly.

Buffy wheeled around bringing her sword up. _Her sword?!_ The blade riposted off Faith's own blade, the familiar broad, sinuously curved dagger that she had borne in the service of Mayor Wilkins, with a clang that sounded deafening in the dead silence that gripped the camp. Faith looked as surprised as Buffy herself was, and backed up a step as well.

Buffy's eyes goggled. Not only did Faith have a dagger she had not carried in years, she was clothed! Her sister Slayer wore tan desert camouflage fatigues, short combat boots, and a sandy-colored tank top. Definitely nothing the Aiel were likely to have on hand, not unless they shopped at Sunnydale Army-Navy Surplus. Then Buffy remembered her own sword, and she looked at it in wonder. It was the same slender blade she had carried against Angel all those years ago. She looked down at herself, and her eyes bulged even wider. She was clothed, too, and in the same Earth garments that had been cut away from her not so long ago! This was impossible.

"This is a trick," Buffy said flatly.

"Hey, I'm still me."

"Prove it."

"I slept with your boyfriend when I possessed your body." Buffy's eyes widened, both in anger at being reminded of that, and in surprise. Faith's clothes shifted as she spoke! One instant, she was standing there in Army surplus; the next, she was clad in more familiar close-fitting black leather pants, with a halter top that revealed far too much of her cleavage. Strappy black stilettos half an inch too high for modesty completed the ensemble.

Faith realized what had happened a moment later, and looked down at herself. She looked up and grinned wickedly. "This may be a trick, B, but I don't think it's theirs. For one thing, if they were gonna try something like this, they'd make it a little less crazy. This doesn't feel like anything they're doing. Buffy—I think _we're_ doing this."

"Doing what?!" Buffy demanded acidly.

"Here, watch." Faith took a deep breath, and suddenly was standing there in the desert camouflage outfit again, only this time, there was a thick belt around her waist with a sheath for her dagger. She slipped the blade into it.

"Faith, you have no idea what you're doing," Buffy rasped.

A wicked glint entered Faith's eyes. "Really?"

Buffy looked down and gave a sharp squawk. She was naked again! She turned a venomous look on Faith. "Stop it!"

"Stop it yourself. All it takes is a thought. I'm dead serious."

Buffy forced her breathing to slow. _I'm calm. I'm calm, and I'm _clothed! As soon as the last thought crossed her mind, she was in fact clothed again, though not in what she had been a moment ago. She was barefoot, but clad in a sleek black tracksuit with three familiar white lines running up the side, and black boxing gloves encased her hands. She started at that, and Faith backed away, her sides splitting with laughter. Buffy concentrated again, harder this time, and this time found herself back in the familiar clothes she had worn here from Sunnydale. The sword was in her hands again as well. She worked to fix that image in her mind, determined that this was how she was going to stay, whatever Faith tried next. Wherever this was, this was far more alien than the world they had arrived at through the Portal Stone. Simple thoughts, apparently even unconscious ones, could literally change the world here.

"All right, how did you get here?" Buffy answered. "I woke up here and you weren't in the tent."

"Beats me," Faith said. "I just sort of found myself here. Kind felt like something was pulling me here, actually."

Buffy thought back on that a moment. She had been thinking about Faith, wanting her here. Here where thoughts could change reality before the eyes. "I think that was me," she said, and explained quickly.

Faith gave a knowing grin. "So you do actually want me here? B, never knew you cared so much."

"Oh forget it," Buffy grated. "Let me try again." She tried to think back on how she might have called Faith here. _Willow. I want Willow here. Willow! I want Willow here, dammit! Now, dammit, now!_ Nothing happened.

"You all right?" Faith asked. "Look like you're about to have a seizure."

Buffy shook her head. "Trying to call Willow."

Faith's eyes went distant. Buffy wasn't sure if she were just thinking hard or if she were trying to do just what Buffy had. In either case, the younger Slayer shook her head after another moment. "Not a clue," she admitted. "Would be weird if only Slayers could come here, though."

Buffy's eyes bulged. "Would be _weird_?" We're in the middle of the ocean, but it might be a little soggy off the starboard bow.

"You know what I mean. Assuming someplace like this exists, which since we're here, I'm going with it does, it would be stupid to think only Slayers come here. You been outside yet?"

Buffy shook her head. "Just had a look. Don't like it—if those Aiel are here, and we go walking around outside ..." she let the thought trail off.

"But how do we get out of here if we _don't_ go out there? Look, Buffy, if those Aiel wake up tomorrow and we're not in the tent—the tent in _their_ world, not this one ..."

"What makes you think this is a different world?" Buffy asked.

Faith fixed her with a level look, and Buffy suddenly felt some kind of change start to come over her. This time, she fixed an image of herself in her mind, an image that she _knew_ was her, and refused to let Faith do—whatever it was she was doing. She had no idea what she was doing, just being purely stubborn, as best she could tell, but it worked, whatever it was. She remained clothed, at any rate. Faith grinned as if she had scored a point anyway, however. "You get the picture," she said.

Buffy looked out the tent flap again. There was no way they could stay here. She hated to admit it, but Faith was right. Wherever this tent was, it was not the tent they were supposed to be in, and if the Aiel came in the morning and found them not in the tent they were supposed to be in, Willow was dead. It was that simple. Whatever else that defied all nature and reason might be going on, that was something simple enough for her to latch onto. She was not going to let her friend die.

She steeled herself. "All right, I'm going to try something." She fixed an image in her mind. A tall, fair-skinned woman with orange-red hair and a soft face, dressed in form-fitting but modest clothing and a ridiculous hat. She opened her eyes and looked to Faith to see if it had worked, and by her sister Slayer's expression, it had. A grin quickly spread across Faith's face.

"Nice trick—Vi," she added. A moment later, however, she was staring at Rona's face where Faith's had been a moment earlier.

"Don't assume that these disguises will hold forever," Buffy cautioned. "But hopefully they'll be better than nothing. Let's have a look around."

They left the tent. Buffy took a deep breath. There was no going back, now. If they were somehow still in the same world with the Aiel, the same world they had gone to sleep in, and they were seen exiting the tent, they had likely just sentenced Willow to death, disguises or no disguises. It didn't look like anyone was watching, though it _felt_ like she was being watched from all sides.

"Split up," she told Faith-Rona. "I'm heading back toward the mountain, you head toward the city. Meet back here in three hours, if not before." Faith-Rona nodded wordlessly and slipped away, darting from tent to tent as if trying to avoid being seen even by people she did not even believe were there.

The city of tents was even more massive than it had seemed from the slopes of the mountain above; it had been dwarfed by the great stone city, what Daeric had named Rhuidean, but now that she was in it, it seemed to stretch on for as far as she could see. The city of tents could easily have held ten thousand, perhaps twelve or thirteen if they were sharing closer quarters. She noticed something else, as well. The tents farther away from the tent where she and Faith were kept seemed somehow less solid, as though the skin over the white mist beneath them were thinner, as though they might fade away if she looked away and looked back. At first she thought that might have something to do with how far she was from where she had entered this strange alternate reality, but then she realized that the ground was as solid as ever; it still seemed bathed in that dreamlike light that came from everywhere and nowhere, but it didn't give off the sense of being about to vanish that the tents did. The ground was happy right where it was. Buffy was thankful for that, at least.

She noticed other things missing, not just people. There was nothing that people would leave lying about, either. No weapons. No tools. No ropes other than those supporting the tents. No stacks of coal for the fires. No food. It was as if the Aiel had left with quite literally everything that was not tied down.

At length, she reached the farthest of the tents, and stood looking across the short desert plain and the beginning of the long slopes back up the mountain of Chaendaer, where the Portal Stone lay. There was no way she would have time to get back up there before sunrise, but she fixed the memory of the location in her mind. She turned to look back out over the city of tents, with the great, scarred stone city of Rhuidean in the background. The entire landscape was bathed in light as bright as that of the full moon, and since the ground at this edge of the camp was a little higher than in the center, she was able to look out over a great deal of the tent city. Twelve thousand, she revised her guess. Maybe fourteen or fifteen if packed tightly.

She picked out the tent where she had been kept; it was taller than most of the others, she remembered, and wider, with a short, clear space around it, isolating it. Then her eyes swept across the tents again. There were at least three other tall tents like that, set apart from the others. _There!_ She thought quickly, fastening her eyes on the one closest to the one where she had been held. _Let's check that out._ She took a step ...

The land blurred, and suddenly, Buffy found herself back in the heart of the city of tents, taking one step out into the clearing around a high, walled tent that could have been the twin of her own. It was not hers, but she could only tell that because the arrangement of the other tents surrounding it was slightly different, and there was just a hair less open space between the nearest smaller tents and this large tent as there was around her own. She was so startled that she lost her hold on her disguise for a moment, and the sword appeared in her hand again. She recovered quickly, however, and resumed the shape of Vi, letting the sword vanish. She stayed hidden behind one of the smaller tents for an instant, then stepped forward hesitantly. What had just happened? She had just taken just a single step. She shook her head in wonder. Nothing about this world made any sense. It was unreal. It was like ...

A dream.

She clapped a hand to her forehead, amazed that she hadn't seen it before now. She had woken up in the same tent where she had been the moment she had gone to sleep. Sleep. It explained too much not to be the answer. The mysterious unlight. The shifting landscape. The clothes from home, and vanishing objects. She was asleep, and this was somehow a dream, and yet not a dream. A not-quite-dream that she was somehow sharing with Faith, that she had somehow pulled Faith into. Slayers had powerful dreams, Giles had once said. Prophetic dreams had been one of the earliest powers she had developed, before she even fully knew what she was becoming as the Slayer.

She checked the tent, but as expected, found it as empty as the rest of the massive camp. There was no thought in her mind of wasting more time checking the others. She could remember where they were in relation to where her own tent was. That was the best she was probably going to be able to do in this place; she could have looked right at where Willow's body was sleeping and seen nothing. Now she had to find Faith. She tried once again calling for Faith, bringing Faith to her, the way she had before, but nothing happened this time. She was still alone amid the tents.

There was something else she could do, however, if she could make it work. She had sent Faith in the direction of the city. From where Buffy stood, if she backed up to give herself enough room to look to the east, she could see the top of one of the palaces. The view from up there would be as good as she could ask. She took another step, and the world blurred again.

----------------------

Faith darted from tent to tent, seeing not the slightest sign of life. There were coal campfires that could have been burning but somehow weren't, even though they looked like someone had been tending them, maybe even only minutes earlier. She reached the edge of the ruined city and looked back. The tent where she and Buffy had been kept must have been fairly close to the edge of the city. She didn't think she had been walking for any more than fifteen minutes. It was a good forty-five to the other side, if her guess meant anything.

It was either continue into the city or head back among the tents. Could these Aiel have taken Willow into the city? Well, of course they could have, they could have taken her anywhere, but would they have? There was no way to know. She could wander for days in that city and not find anything, especially with no people to see. Unsure, she decided to work her way south along the border of the tent city and the stone city, towards the riven lake against the southern valley wall.

It didn't take her long to come to the conclusion that if these Aiel had built the stone city, she would eat sand. Every building was a palace many stories high, no two alike, spires and columns and arches and towers of twisting, marbled, or polished stone, most seeming to have been carved of a single piece rather than built. At the crowns, the opened in curving blossoms, or arched inward to sweeping domes, or fanned out into smaller towers on the heights, or were simply carved in the likenesses of mythical creatures or heroes. Even showing the unmistakable scars of battle, very possibly recent, the city was beautiful. It would have taken human masons centuries to build, and even if these Aiel could lift blocks of stone the way they had lifted Willow off that mattress, it would have taken many years to build something like this. In addition, if they had, there would be no reason for them to be living in a temporary city of tents. Come to think of it, even if they hadn't, there was no reason for them to be living in that tent city. Maybe many had been forced to by the battle, whatever it had been. There were signs of reconstruction here and there, holes in palaces that had been patched with considerably less skill than that of the original builders.

She reached the lake. She wasn't sure what she expected to find here, but there was nothing exceptional about it, save that it was probably the biggest body of water in this damned desert. No docks, either. Apparently the desert folk weren't much for sailing. Then again, she would have expected to see some provision there for fishing, too. Did they not eat fish for some reason? Were there no fish in the lake? Was the water poisonous somehow? She doubted that. No one would have put a city on the edge of a toxic lake. Unless they knew some way to remove the poison, she thought after a moment, and it was either that or no water at all. Ugh. Too much thinking.

"Enjoying the view, Sharan?" a cold voice demanded next to her.

She spun to see Alsera standing not ten feet from her. How had the woman snuck up on her? The woman had to have crossed twenty paces of open ground unseen. She hoped her disguise held, that the woman couldn't see through it. That was all the time she had to wonder, however, before she felt some kind of force acting on her, and felt her clothes just begin to vanish. Just for an instant, then Faith's self-preservation instinct took over. _No! _ she shouted into the silence of her mind. _You are _not _going to change me!_ The form of Rona solidified again, and her clothes with it. Alsera's eyes widened imperceptibly.

"Interesting," Alsera continued icily. Suddenly, with no warning, Nandrys and Dainya and the other Wise One were alongside her, and another four besides; there was no flash or anything else to announce their arrival, one minute they were simply not there, and the next, they were. Faith felt something wrap around her wrists, and suddenly her arms were bound behind her again.

_No! _ She thought desperately again, and her arms were suddenly free, but more bindings came. _I have to get away! MOVE!_ The frenzied thought took her, and for an instant it felt like she were pulling away, into someplace else, though where that might be, she had no idea, but it was as though an unseen, iron force blocked the way; it gave slightly, but then tightened and pulled her back to the lakeshore.

Suddenly, she was no longer on the lakeshore. She was in the lake. She was so surprised that she nearly tried to breathe in a mouthful of the water before she had time to steel herself. _No!_ The thought surged through her consciousness again, this time given power by more than fear of being imprisoned again. The water vanished, and she was back on the lakeshore. But now the ground beneath her was no longer solid; she was sinking into it. Quicksand. She grabbed up again, and a rope was there for her, and as she grabbed it, it lifted her from the sand. Then the rope was cut, but she forced herself to think of the rock surface, not quicksand, rock, and she fell back onto solid stone. She was growing desperate, however. There was no way she could win this, and the Wise Ones seemed to have some way to keep her from getting away, and she had no idea how she had even attempted to get away in the first place. She tried throwing herself backward in her mind again, but again ran into that unseen force. Then she felt something harder, more solid, than that, and realize that she had backed into a stone pillar that wasn't there before. Bands of pure shadow reached out from around it and folded around her, pulling her fast back against the pillar. The cords were like ice where they touched her skin, numbing her senses. One snaked around her head, dulling her thoughts. That was enough to make the difference. A heartbeat later, her clothing vanished again, and her scream was cut off as a wad of cloth suddenly filled her mouth. A single tear burst from the corners of her eye.

"Rona!" a voice suddenly called. The Wise Ones turned as one in the direction of the tents, as Buffy-Vi suddenly appeared at the edge of the closest row, but a moment later, they, too, were seized from behind. A great net of stout cord suddenly surrounded the entire group, the cord leading away from it fastened to something in the distance out over the water behind the Wise Ones, which they had turned away from to look at Buffy-Vi. There was a great heave on the cord, and the Wise Ones were seized away into the night.

Buffy-Vi bounded forward, the pillar and bindings dissolving around Faith as she did. "It's a dream, Rona, this is a dream! Wake up!" And with that, Buffy hauled back and delivered a stinging slap across Faith's cheek. Faith threw herself backward the way she had a moment earlier; the force that had barred her way was still there, but weaker, as if it were alive and suddenly hesitant or off-balance. For some reason, it felt like Buffy's slap sent her hurtling into it, and though she flinched against the impact, which stung as though she had belly-flopped into the surface of a dark, vertical lake, she was suddenly through, and darkness enveloped her.

------------------------------

Buffy's breath caught as Faith vanished. _It worked. It better have worked._ She thought it must have, or Faith would likely still be here. Plus there was that sense of Faith falling backward, not entirely unlike the feeling she had gotten when Dawn had fallen backward into the real world, back to California. That was encouraging, she hoped. Now there was only the matter of getting out of here herself.

No sooner had the thought come to her than the eight Wise Ones were all back on the lakeshore as if they had never been gone; not a one was even wet. Buffy threw herself sideways before they could try doing to her what they had done to Faith. As quick as that, she was atop the roof of the nearest palace, but she did not stop there. Covering hundreds of yards at a stride, she dove into the city. It was the only place she could think of that might have enough cover to hide. Back and forth she wove, until her last leap carried her from a high balcony on one side of what looked to be the city's central square to the inside of a small second-floor window, barely large enough to fit through, lower on the same building. She hoped that she had lost them. If they could follow her through twenty jumps, however, they could follow her through a hundred.

She cast her eyes across the square. Her eyes were drawn immediately to the great tree in the center, ringed by a small forest of translucent, silvery crystal columns. It not merely the sheer size of the tree that drew her gaze, though that was commanding enough. Somehow, the tree seemed more solid here than even the land itself, and in fact, in this mysterious dreamworld, there was little sign of the battle damage the tree had suffered in the waking world; limbs that had been blackened or burned away entirely spread from the mighty trunk here, hale and untouched, distinctive trefoil leaves blossoming from a hundred smaller branches at the end.

She turned away from the tree, and something else caught her eye, something that should have been too small to be here from everything she had just seen. There were items small enough to be carried lying scattered around the square. There did not seem to be any organization to their placement, and they were as different from one another as sparrows from apples, but they were there. A wide, thin bracelet of jade set with silver stones lay not ten paces from the foot of the building where Buffy hid. Several paces beyond that lay what looked to be a rope necklace of soft, thin golden strands. Most of the items she could see were jewelry, but many were not. There were carved figurines, slender rods and wands, ornamental knives, and more. Nearly at the limit of her vision to her left, she saw a delicate wire globe somewhat smaller than a bowling ball. Perhaps the same distance to her right, a bronze crozier had been embedded in the ground at a slight angle.

She would have gazed longer, but a slight movement signaled the arrival of one of the Wise Ones near the middle of the square, just on the near side of the forest of glass columns in front of the great tree. Buffy tensed, watching, and a moment later, Dainya appeared beside the first Wise One. There was nothing in particular to suggest that the pair had seen her, but something put her instantly on her guard. She had to get out of here. The Wise Ones were here. They knew how to get here. That meant there was a way out. She had basically knocked Faith out of this dream. Could she do the same to herself? Maybe without clocking herself across the mouth?

Suddenly, something grabbed her by the shoulders, and she fought back a cry. Who had come up on ...

"Gyuuuh!" she gasped as she sat bolt upright on her mattress, then rolled and twisted to get away from whatever had gripped her. The desert air was cold against her bare skin. She realized she was naked once more, and the air was not all that cold, but for some reason, the dreamworld had seemed to lack all temperature, and this was somehow cool by comparison. Goosebumps prickled up and down her skin.

"Easy!" Faith's voice hissed, and Buffy suddenly understood; her sister Slayer had shaken her awake. Somehow she had felt that in the dreamworld. She looked up to see Faith hanging lightly by just her hands, high on the center pole of the tent. How she had managed to jump up there in the dark without bringing the whole tent crashing down, Buffy would never know. It had probably saved Faith a second whack on the jaw, however.

"Well that was weird," Buffy said.

"You're telling me," Faith answered. "And I've got one more bit of weirdness for you. I think your bruises follow you out of there."

"What?"

"That lick you gave me? I think I've got a handprint on my cheek right now. Not just a memory, B. It's there. If we end up back there somehow, don't get killed."

Buffy's blood froze. "Nightmares can kill you here? Faith, if that's the case, I'm in real trouble. Almost all my dreams are nightmares."

"Me too," Faith replied resignedly. "And the others ... well, I hope you can't get pregnant from dreams here, either." Buffy's face flushed, and a throaty laugh escaped Faith's lips before fading into an uncomfortable silence.

Buffy groaned. "We can't just not sleep. I feel like I didn't sleep a wink. I'm still feeling that fighting. And the march."

"Same," Faith sighed. "I'm going to chance it again, B. No way not to."

"And if you wake up in that dreamworld again?"

"Then this time, I stay in this tent and just go straight to sleep there, too. Maybe I'll wake up in a dream inside a dream and go to sleep in that one, too."

Buffy sighed. She was going to end up sleeping sometime tonight whether she wanted to or not. Even she had her limits. She could feel her heart still racing, but it was already slowing, and her eyelids were drooping. She shrugged in resignation. "See you there," she murmured, rolling back onto the mattress.

She sat up. That cursed dream-light was back. She was back. She looked around for Faith, and saw the raven-haired Slayer already there. She suppressed a smile. The tent was still there, and Faith was there, but in the place of the rough mattress where Faith had been sleeping, the ambient light revealed that Faith had done a little redecorating. She was stretched out on a small, sturdy wooden bed with a feather mattress and down pillows. Hanging from one post of the bed by Faith's head was the belt she had worn in the dream earlier, with her dagger in its sheath. A plush comforter was drawn up around her, but she had the distinct impression that her sister Slayer was still naked underneath. Buffy looked down at herself and smiled. She was wearing her favorite teddy-bear pajamas.

Buffy couldn't stomach a grimace. If Faith was right, and anything that hurt you here hurt you in the waking world, then it was all the more dangerous as going to sleep in the waking world—more, since someone could be upon you here from miles away in an eyeblink. Nevertheless, there was no help for it. She wasn't in the mood to be as imaginative as Faith; the one thing she could think of most clearly was her own little bed from her bedroom back in Sunnydale. A Sunnydale which didn't even exist anymore, she reflected. The bed appeared readily enough, however. She sprawled out on the mattress, asleep before she even had time to pull the covers about her.

-----------------------

Alsera peeled back the tent flap to peer at the two sleeping women, their figures clearly illuminated in the soft light that permeated _Tel'aran'rhiod_, despite the fact that the moon was a waning crescent and there were no candles lit within the tent. They were there. Sleeping soundly. Sleeping! In _Tel'aran'rhiod_! She had never heard of the like. It should not even be possible. Falling asleep in the World of Dreams sent one immediately back to one's own body, yet here the two strange warriors were, sound asleep, one on a bed that she doubted any wetlander crafter had ever built. Brass! Wood was the greater luxury, and yet it came in plenty in the wetlands, and was easier to work besides. And those nightclothes, whatever they were ... those creatures were hardly threatening, yet utterly foreign.

She stepped aside so that the other women with her could see, then brought herself to the Wise Ones' tent, half a mile away. The others were only half a step behind her. There were thirteen here, now, thirteen of the most senior Wise Ones to have remained in the Waste when the spears followed the _Car'a'carn_ to the wetlands. She found herself wishing that Bruan was here, though he had his obligations, and she hers.

"Alsera, this is madness. The _Car'a'carn_ himself did not change so much I thought I knew." That was Nandrys, and she seemed to speak for more than herself.

"Those two would have to be here in the flesh to be here any more strongly."

"How did they survive so long in Tel'aran'rhiod if they sleep here? They should be dead in their beds a hundred times over."

"I think," Alsera began softly, but the others quieted at her words. She was the only Wise One of a clan chief present, and had the better of all the others here by twenty years. "I think that was their first time in the World of Dreams."

A stunned silence greeted her, though by the expression on one or two of the older faces present, she saw that she had not been alone in thinking that, merely alone in voicing it. She continued, "they were strong, strong beyond anything save what Egwene al'Vere might become one day, but they were clumsy, too. They acted like wild horses. Everything they did was through sheer strength of will, not training. Not skill. That was the clumsiest attempt to breach a barrier I've ever seen; that she came close to succeeding terrifies me. And if they thought of it, I'm sure they would not have taken the forms of other women but remained in clothes that could only come from this California of theirs."

"So you believe that tale?"

"I see no reason not to. Amys and Melaine tell me that they know of nothing in the wetlands like these two. These three, I should say. None of the Aes Sedai sworn to the _Car'a'carn_ have heard of the like, either. That leaves Shara, Seanchan, the Sea Folk, or the Shadow."

"I will not believe the first three," Kendera said pointedly, "but I remain unconvinced of the fourth. I know nothing of other worlds, but in this one, none but the Shadowsouled could know the workings of the Portal Stones."

"I do not believe Willow Rosenberg, at least, is of the Shadow," Alsera said flatly.

"It is not the way of any servant of the Shadow to sacrifice for another," Nandrys added, her voice iron. "Those two would have laid down their lives for Willow Rosenberg. They gave up their freedom rather than see her hurt. They act like Warders."

"Who can say all the tricks of the Shadow?"

"Even if they are from this California, they may be too dangerous to let live."

Alsera turned to the woman who had spoken. Caithryn of the Moshien Shaido, recently returned to Rhuidean with the news that the entire Shaido clan was returning to the Three-fold Land, those that had survived the disastrous leadership of Sevanna. She was a competent dreamwalker, but was one of the two Wise Ones gathered here who could not channel, as Sevanna had kept all of the Shaido Wise Ones who could close to her, and they had all been sent deep into the wetlands by some trick of the Power. Caithryn's party had somehow emerged from the scattering still reasonably close to the Jangai Pass, and she had held them together. Alsera suspected that Caithryn had quietly arranged to avoid any news from Sevanna reaching those she had been left with in the lands of the treekillers, so that she could avoid hearing any summons from Sevanna to gather in faraway Altara, where the main body of the Shaido had ultimately gone soft in the lavish comforts of the wetlands and been defeated. She had managed to glean news of Sevanna's overthrow and the order to return to the Three-fold Land quickly enough, however.

Caithryn met Alsera's gaze levelly. "If that was their first hour in _Tel'aran'rhiod_," she continued, "do we dare let them learn for even another week? We have to assume that they will be here every night, if they can enter it so easily, so strongly, not even knowing what they do."

There was an uneasy silence. Caithryn talked of killing in cold blood so casually; that was seldom done, even to wetlanders who crossed into the Three-fold Land knowing full well that they were not welcome. Alsera's mouth twisted. Shaido. There were no laws about those who came by Portal Stone. It had never happened, as far as Alsera could remember, and like all the others here, she remembered lifetimes that were not even her own, memories she had carried with her since walking through the glass columns surrounding _Avendesora_ in her final test to become a Wise One.

"No," she said. The faces in the tent turned to her again. "Their strength is their weakness. Strong as they are in the dream, if they have to sleep here, then they are vulnerable here. I will not order them killed in cold blood for the mere sin of being who they are. Or what they are." She sighed. "I will not tell them, but I believe them." Sightblinder himself could not have come up with three women so foreign, and had he meant to lull them into complacency, he would not have made them so obviously dangerous, nor sent them straight to the heights of Chaendaer. In addition, while those two warriors might not dream as others did, young Willow Rosenberg's dreams seemed unfeigned, dreams of loss and confusion and other things one would expect in someone torn unexpectedly away from their home, and she had seen glimpses in the girl's dreams of a land unlike any she had ever seen or heard tell of, including her own memories of her deepest ancestors from the end of the Age of Legends.

The faces of the women gathered in the tent told her that not all believed, but most did. Perhaps three still doubted. Well, that could be healthy. Doubt had its place in the world. In any world. Then again, even those who believed clearly were divided about what to do; Caithryn, to all appearances, believed, but would send the newcomers to their deaths nevertheless.

"And if you are wrong?" Caithryn asked in a forceful whisper, as if reading her thoughts.

"Then we will deal with them as we must."

* * *

**Author's Notes: ** Thanks again to everyone who reviewed! You guys are amazing, which is always good to see. (Heck, for a WoT crossover, I'm glad to see you even exist! Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Or would, if I did warm and fuzzy. Somewhat OOC for me.) 

_ellf:_ I don't generally spoil things, but I will say emphatically that Shai'tan will _not_ turn out to be the First. The First was a pretty boring Big Bad (never mind a budget cut, since it let the writers write "bad guy" parts for actors they'd already hired ...). Shai'tan is the genuine article. In addition, Shai'tan is locked in Shayol Ghul, completely beyond this or any world—would make it hard to be in California.

_Iceflame55:_ The First Slayer, you say? Hmm ... patience. ;-)

_Tombadgerlock:_ Wackiness!

_asgwerth:_ The two battles were the one with the Turok-han and the one with the Aiel. Willow told the Wise Ones about the battle with the Turok-han, and the Slayers were talking about it when they thought they were alone.

_Joe:_ If you've read the first ten books, you only have one main story book and two prequel books to go to get caught up, which (proportionally) isn't that much. Plus there's only one main story book left to be released (though I hear it might be the longest yet in the series ...) I'll also say, just on personal opinion, that books 9 and 10 were two of the worst in the series, while 11 was one of the best.

_Nonibait:_ Glad I was able to attract your attention!

_Dragonsdaughter1:_ The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills ... but, erm, ahem ahem ...

_Allen Pitt:_ I definitely agree that the prophetic dreams of the Slayers (and possibly other dream-oriented powers ... the First Slayer seemed to have plenty, at least) never got the kind of airtime they should have, especially considering how important they were in the very first episode of the series. I also agree with the rule of No Naked Giles.

_BlueDove:_ Maybe we just need something to get you interested again!

_ColPinky:_ I'll certainly try. Thanks for the reviews on both chapters so far!

_JezaEiri:_ There are definitely lots of interesting possible encounters out there, and I'll never be able to write them all unless I make this thing as long as the Wheel of Time itself. (Not very likely.) Rand has made himself scarce at the end of Book 11, so finding him might be problematic. Some of the other characters, however, just can't seem to help being in the center of events whether they want to be or not ...

**Coming Soon:** Chapter 4, "The Harsh Light of Day." Buffy, Willow, and Faith were quite the surprise to the people of this world. However, this world has a few more surprises in store for the California crew, too ... of course, there's an off chance that they could be good surprises, right?

LOL.

**Sneak Preview: **"_Up spears! Wake and up spears!" the shouts rang out from the Aiel gathered around the fire, and more from nearby. The sound of running boots filled the night, and Buffy realized that every face nearby other than hers and Faith's was suddenly veiled. A brazen horn sounded somewhere out among the tents. Their attackers commanded Buffy's attention more than anything else, however. Her eyes bulged._


	4. The Harsh Light of Day

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there would be a little bit more True Religion in my wardrobe. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 4:**

**THE HARSH LIGHT OF DAY**

"All right, thanks, Angel, you rock." Andrew Wells flipped the satellite phone closed, and Giles and several of the newly awakened Slayers clustered closer to hear the news. Everyone had been so surprised when he happened to have the phone in his luggage. It had turned into a lifesaver. Every cell tower within miles was out of commission, so the satellite phone was their only link to the outside world.

"What's the deal?" Rona asked eagerly. "We stayin'?"

"For a while," Andrew announced proudly, as if he had done everything himself. It had been his satellite phone that had enabled them to get in contact with Angel, after all. "Wolfram & Hart has a lobbying division that must have friends in really high places."

"Or really low," Xander observed dryly. He was standing just outside the circle of Slayers, pretending not to be as interested as he clearly was.

"Or really low," Andrew agreed, and continued. "Rather than FEMA coming to investigate themselves, they're outsourcing to Perihelion Partners, so we're good."

"Who? What?"

Andrew waved his hands to quiet the chatter. Everyone was so impatient! Well, I guess that made sense, but that didn't give them a right to be impatient with _him_. "It's a private company, big government contractor, and also one hundred percent owned by Wolfram & Hart's science division. Bottom line is this whole area is officially under Angel's control now, and he says we've got at least three months, as long as he can hold off Greenpeace and the Sierra Club."

"And since the Republicans are in power, that won't be a problem," Vi grinned.

"Yes, but even better, he convinced the California state legislature to dissolve the town officially—didn't take much convincing, really. They're going to auction off the town land, and since it's one big ruin, no one's really going to be bidding on it. Couldn't even use it as a park at this point. Angel's going to try to buy the whole area. Then we'll really have the place to ourselves, basically forever."

"So we're golden, then, is the bottom line."

"Well, we don't have to worry about the government, anyway," Andrew said. He hated to be a downer, but some things had to be said. "But we still do have to worry about that thing." He nodded down into the crater, in the general direction of the strange stone pillar where Buffy, Faith, and Willow had vanished. Dawn would be down there somewhere, with Kennedy and some of the other Slayers on duty. The Slayers had been sleeping in shifts of four on the white stone base surrounding the engraved monolith, just in case Dawn did somehow reactivate it; Andrew guessed that some were actually hoping that she would, that they would get a chance to go wherever it was Buffy and the others had gone. Or, in Kennedy's case, Willow and the others; there was no doubt who was first in her mind among the departed. It had been all for nothing so far. He sighed. Giles was no slouch with his books, but this kind of applied magic was more Willow's department. The rest of them were fumbling around in the dark like a band of blind men, even if none of them would admit it aloud. They were going to be here a while.

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Faith stood at the western edge of the city of tents, watching the sun set over the mountain of Chaendaer. If the light had been better, she might barely have been able to see the fifteen-foot pillar on its white stone base set there in the mountainside, the Portal Stone by which she, Buffy, and Willow had entered this world. She shook her head. They had been here for more than a day now. Had they remained on Earth, Faith would have been getting ready to go break a few hearts in West Hollywood right about now. She had planned on teaching Vi and Rona a thing or two about how to deal with the less intelligent sex, too. Now they were probably all camped out in that crater, trying to find some way to get Dawn to do again whatever it was she had done to send Buffy, Willow, and Faith to Rhuidean. That was assuming that the Army or National Guard hadn't shown up by now and booted them all from the area. Of course, more than likely, the girl had no clue what she'd done, and if she tried again, either nothing would happen, or they'd end up in yet another completely different world. According to Willow, those Portal Stones opened to more worlds than just Earth and this one. Dawn could end up in whatever hell the Turok-han had come from, just as Willow had feared the three of them would.

"There's nothing you can do for them, Faith." a soft voice said beside her. Faith turned to see Melainda, one of the Aiel women warriors, _Far Dareis Mai—_Maidens of the Spear—that had been her "companions" since yesterday. She assumed they had been set to watch and guard her, and yet they had been surprisingly friendly ever since the white-robed _gai'shain_ had brought her and Buffy clothes in the morning. One would never have known that the two of them had been marched into the camp naked with their arms tied behind their backs less than a day earlier, or that their best friend had been unconscious and slung over the shoulder of the massive war-band leader, Daeric, like a sack of grain. Melainda herself was a smiling, tomboyish girl—most of the Maidens were—who could easily have passed for a typical American suburban girl, if taller and more athletic than average, if she weren't wearing the brown _cadin'sor_ that all the Aiel warriors wore, and carrying three spears, a small shield, and a curved horn bow across her back.

"For who?" Faith asked.

"Whoever it is in your thoughts that worries you."

"Am I that obvious?"

"I would not play tiles until you learn to school your features," she said with a grin.

Faith shook her head. "Can't help it," she said. "They're going to get themselves in all kinds of trouble trying to come after us. I know Xander and Giles—the, um, I guess the leaders, now that we're gone—they don't know when to quit. They'll keep hammering at that damn stone until they end up in the land of the dinosaurs or something."

"These dinosaurs—they are Shadowspawn?"

Faith chuckled. "No. Just, um, really big and really dangerous animals. Lizards. Only bigger than that tent. And some with teeth the size of swords."

"Truly? I might like to hunt a—a dinosaur—one day."

Faith threw back her head and laughed. On second thought, maybe the girl wouldn't fit in so well in California, after all. She was dead serious. Then again, from everything she had seen of these Aiel so far, at least the warrior societies, which seemed to include almost everyone of fighting age, they might well consider a dinosaur hunt to be good sport.

"Thanks," she said. "I needed that."

Melainda looked puzzled. "Needed what?"

"Nothing. Just—to laugh. Damn, I know they'll be all right, I just let myself get too wound up. Need to chill out a bit."

A glint that should have given Faith pause appeared in Melainda's eyes. "We may not be able to make you colder," she noted, "but if you want to take your mind off your worries, I think we might have something for that. Tell me, Faith, do you have_oosquai_ in California?"

Faith shook her head. "Not that I've heard of ... what is it?"

Melainda's grin only broadened.

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The sun had been gone behind the western wall of the valley of Rhuidean for just over two hours, but darkness fell quickly in the desert valley, sunken as it was deep in the shadow of Chaendaer. Buffy had been walking through the camp since late morning, partly out of sheer boredom and partly because she wanted to test the limits of her recently-regained freedom. Not that she was complaining, but it was somehow eerie to have such free rein of the camp one day after being hauled into the camp as a prisoner. Not a camp, she had discovered. More of a temporary city as the true city of Rhuidean was resettled. Apparently the place had been a kind of holy site until very recently, with the arrival of this _Car'a'carn_ that Willow and the Wise Ones had spoken of the night before. Now that it was open to resettlement, and had more fresh water than the rest of the Aiel Waste combined, Aiel were trying to move in faster than the reconstruction of the city could move. She had not been wrong in her estimate of the size of the tent city in the dreamworld; twelve thousand Aiel had already gathered here, and another few thousand more had already moved into the city, always choosing the palaces nearest the lake first. Buffy would have been most attracted to the great tree and open square at the heart of the city that she had seen in the dream—she had yet to see it in the waking world—but if she had gone her entire life without seeing more water in one place than a child could step across, she admitted that she might have felt differently.

Late in the afternoon, she had discovered the first non-Aiel people of this world she had ever encountered. According to the Wise Ones, three kinds of people had been allowed to cross the Three-fold Land in safety: Tinkers, gleemen, and peddlers. She had yet to meet a Tinker or a gleeman, whatever those were, but a peddler's caravan had been crossing the Waste from Shara to Cairhien when news of Rhuidean's reopening had reached them, and they had turned their wagons here to see if there was trade to be done here. It had turned out that there was, and more than a little. The Aiel were surprisingly wealthy for a civilization that to all outward appearances seemed to live a subsistence life in the middle of a barren desert. They did not appear to have coins, but she had seen enough gold and jewelry change hands in the hour she had spent among the wagons to stock every jewelry store in a good-sized mall in California. Buffy, of course, had had nothing to offer, but she had spent more than a little time looking around the peddler's wagons, anyway, partly because it was more exciting than anything else going on in the camp and partly because, while she was more than grateful to have clothing once again, she wanted more than one single outfit of Aiel _algode_, the cotton-like material that was the fabric of choice for most Aiel garments—and the ropes that had bound her the previous night, she reflected dryly—to call her own. Nandrys had given her the outfit, a simple long-sleeved tunic, pants, and leather sandals. The craziest part about it was, she got the impression that the woman had given it in some kind of payment, or even a reward, for defeating her husband barehanded! Regardless, the peddlers had garments and bolts of silk and soft wool, and the silks in particular drew her eyes; they were lighter than _algode_. She hadn't exactly packed for interdimensional travel. Fortunately, the peddler, a short, swarthy man by the name of Maglor Egan, had said that he intended to remain at least another three days; Aiel gold would be more welcome in Cairhien and Andor than Sharan silk, though apparently a good deal of the gold might well have actually been plundered from Cairhien more than twenty years earlier.

Abruptly, the sound of singing caught her ears. That surprised her. That was something new. She had not heard any of the Aiel sing at all. There had been some finely worked musical instruments on the peddler's wagons, packed away in the back as though he knew full well that no one here would be interested in them. Even if the Aiel did sing, there was no way that they would be singing that! Setting her teeth, she quickened her steps in the direction of her sister Slayer's voice—which she admitted, in a distant corner of her mind, was a good deal better than her own, if her memory of her confrontation with the demon Sweet served. The Aiel had no instruments, but they were able to make a rumbling, percussive accompaniment with their spears and shields.

_"Passion or coincidence once prompted you to say  
Pride will tear us both apart;  
Well, now pride's gone out the window cross the rooftops, run away—  
Left me in the vacuum of my heart.  
What is happening to me?  
Crazy, some'd say.  
Where is my friend when I need you most?  
Gone away..."_

Buffy had reached the circle now, and to her chagrin, saw that Faith had attracted herself more than a small audience. At least two dozen Aiel, mostly Maidens of the Spear, but more than a few men and other women as well, had gathered for her friend's impromptu karaoke night. In Faith's left hand was a small, bowl-shaped glass tumbler, and Buffy had a feeling that that cup had been refilled more than once. Faith noticed Buffy immediately, and only let her voice rise into a swelling crescendo for one final chorus.

_"But I wont cry for yesterday, there's an ordinary world  
Somehow I have to find,  
And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world,  
I will learn to survive!"_

_I'm never going to listen to that one the same way again_, Buffy thought to herself, but the Maidens and other fighters gathered around her actually rattled their shields in approbation. Apparently they weren't as averse to others singing as they were themselves. Now that she looked around, she also saw that Faith's was not the only cup in evidence, and one of the men was refilling his own from a large ceramic vat, nearly the size of a trash can. Buffy noted that he had to dip nearly halfway down into the vat to do so.

"Another tale! Another tale!" one of the Maidens closest to Faith—Melainda, had her name been?—called, clapping her hands loudly, which she could do because she had passed her cup to someone else near the vat to refill.

Faith laughed, which became a snort—a snort!—and held up a hand for silence to let her begin. Apparently it was not the first time, either, since the crowd was clamoring for "another," and they already had the look of a practiced audience, one into the act.

"So we have these creatures in our world, called alligators, right ..."

Buffy shook her head helplessly as Faith launched into another one of her wild tales. She wanted to jump across the gathering and punch the younger woman, but that would only give away that she thought Faith was being too free with her tongue. In addition, these people already knew that she and Faith were no ordinary fighters, and for all she knew, Willow had already told the Wise Ones all there was to know about Slayers—maybe even more than Buffy knew herself, she added with a grimace. Then again, she would not put it past the Wise Ones to tell some of their Maidens of the Spear to get drunk together with Faith in order to loosen information out of her, maybe to get her to reveal something they had been trying to keep hidden. If the Maidens had simply been assigned this as a task, however, they were nevertheless embracing it with gusto.

"How much has she had?" she dared asking the nearest Aiel she knew, a massive, heavyset man named Waric, who had walked with her for half an hour or so earlier that day.

Waric grinned, the smile twisting an old scar that crossed his lips in an odd shape like a snake. "I haven't the faintest idea, Buffy Summers."

Buffy shook her head. She wished there were some way she could figure out exactly how much Faith had already said, but then again, there would be nothing she could do about it, anyway. Come to think of it, Faith might actually have been helping the Aiel believe their story. They had not agreed not to reveal anything, either; after all, it was increasingly obvious that these people had no connection to the Turok-han whatsoever, and were hardly going to be sending word through the Portal Stone somehow that Earth was without its two most powerful defenders. Its three most powerful defenders, she reflected a moment later. Willow had more than earned her stripes by now. Granted, with hundreds of new Slayers active around the world, the planet was probably safer than it had ever been in its entire history, but that didn't stop Buffy worrying. Even Vi and Rona and the others that the rest looked up to weren't really ready to take on leadership roles yet, and the Council had been destroyed. Well, not that she would have wanted the Council in charge of hundreds of Slayers, anyway, but Giles could never handle that many by himself, either.

Her thoughts were distracted by something she couldn't quite put her finger on, but it returned her attention to the real world. At first she thought it must have been something Faith had done, but the raven-haired Slayer had fallen surprisingly quiet on the far side of the fire pit. She had set down her glass of whatever liquor the Aiel were serving, still half full. Buffy looked around, and the sense of something wrong grew in the back of her mind, though she still couldn't put her finger on what was causing it. It felt like a foul stench from some fetid creature approaching, but there were no fumes in the air. She noticed that some of the older and more watchful Aiel had begun casting their gazes from side to side as well, not nervously, merely watchfully, and the hands of one or two had drifted toward their spear hafts.

Abruptly, something dark sprang up and seized Buffy by the throat. Noise erupted from everywhere at once, stools overturned, spears and shields drawn. Buffy gave a choked cough as a breath was strangled out of her, then threw whatever it was away from her with a mighty heave. She had no idea what it was that her flailing arms had hit; it let go of her throat, but it didn't feel like anything she had ever hit before, as if it were somehow only half there.

"Up spears! Wake and up spears!" the shouts rang out from the Aiel gathered around the fire, and more from nearby. The sound of running boots filled the night, and Buffy realized that every face nearby other than hers and Faith's was suddenly veiled. A brazen horn sounded somewhere out among the tents. Their attackers commanded Buffy's attention more than anything else, however. Her eyes bulged.

Her own shadow had tried to kill her.

Around the fire, she watched Aiel wrestling, kicking, stabbing at shadows that had taken on lives, and apparently murderous wills, of their own, and were apparently very much capable of striking out at their owners. Several Aiel were already down.

A blow to her stomach staggered her, and she threw up an arm to take the next, but the force of that was enough to throw her backward as well. Her shadow struck as hard as she did! She threw a kick back, but it was hard to see where exactly she was supposed to hit to hit the shadow attacking her, and what was simply striking at thin air. The shadow seemed to change shape depending on how it was exposed to the firelight, just as a real shadow would, meaning its head wasn't quite where it should be even if you could identify where its arms or legs were.

With a snarl, she gave up trying to find the thing's throat—would crushing a shadow's windpipe even do any good, anyway?—and seized the thing's arm the next time it leveled a blow at her own throat. Her arms closed around something—it was not as solid as flesh, but it was solid enough to grab, and that was all Buffy needed. She gave a ferocious twist, lifting the shadow off its immaterial feet, spun the thing around twice, and hurled it away into the dark. It left her hands as if launched from a catapult; how much did shadows weigh, anyway?

"Go for their arms!" she shouted the instant she recovered enough breath to do so. "Whatever they're hitting you with, hit that!"

Faith was the quickest to pick up what she had meant. Her shadow had done exactly what Buffy's had, wrapped its hands around her throat and tried to choke the life out of her, and she had been trying to return the favor, but couldn't find anything to grapple. Hearing Buffy, she seized the thing's wrists and crushed inward; Faith could grind an eight-ball into powder with that grip, and even her shadow's hands, which seemed to have all the strength Faith herself did, couldn't maintain their grip against that pressure. Faith refused to let go there, either, displaying presence of mind no matter how much of that Aiel liquor she had drunk; she wrestled the shadow off its immaterial feet, then dove to stretch the shadow over the blazing coals of the fire pit. There was a soundless shriek, and the shadow writhed and jerked away like a terrified animal, pulling free of Faith's grip in the process.

_Doesn't matter,_ Buffy though, a renewed light of battle entering her eyes. _If they're scared, they can be killed._

"Light!" she called. "Pull them close to bright ...urgh!" her warning was cut off as two more shadows caught up with her, their own owners already lying on the ground, unconscious or worse. Some of the Aiel had clearly caught her warning, however, as she saw some definitely change the direction of their fighting, alternatively dragging or trying to lure their shadows toward the fire pit.

Faith was a step ahead of even them, however. There was a large box of extra coal for the fire sitting a few feet away from the fire, and she had bought herself a few seconds of extra time in her fight with her own shadow. She seized the box and threw it over the coals already on the fire.

"No!" one of the other Aiel called, and Buffy realized why a moment later; the new coals, despite being high-quality coal that would burn brightly, would take time to heat, and Faith had just covered the brighter coals beneath.

Faith affected not to notice. "Everyone grab your dance partner!" she shouted. Faith saw her close one hand around the calf of her own shadow, which had finally managed to come at her again. Only one hand, however. She twisted around to throw her shadow off balance, but also to work her way over to the great vat of liquor. Seizing it with her free hand by one massive handle, she catapulted herself into the air. Eyes wide, Buffy realized what she was doing. She twisted around to get beneath her two shadowy assailants; they were both unprepared for this move, as it was typically a very bad idea to let your enemy get on top of you, so they had not set themselves to prevent her doing so. Buffy seized each shadow, one in each hand, and held it upward so that as much of it as possible was exposed to the fire.

There was a roar and a rush of wind, and a great column of red flame blasted skyward from the fire pit. The sudden light caught both of the shadows in Buffy's grip like leaves in a wind, as with dark flashes, they shattered into nothingness. Several others, whose flesh-and-blood Aiel opponents had managed to position themselves well, met the same fate; others, however, were shielded from the light by the very Aiel they were fighting. Faith was on the far side of the roaring column of flame; Buffy had lost sight of her.

Another shadow lunged at Buffy, faster than either of the two that had just been obliterated by the flare, and she realized that her own shadow had returned from wherever she had hurled it and rejoined the party. She ducked and weaved, but the thing was as fast as she was, and its blows were all but invisible. One blow to her solar plexus nearly knocked all the wind from her lungs, and she staggered and had to leap backward, away from the fire, to avoid the thing leveling a blow at her throat.

The shadow came at her again, and from this angle, Buffy noticed something else. The two shadows that had just been obliterated were not actually gone. They had returned to their owners, who currently lay prostrate near the fire, normal shadows once again. And her shadow clearly stepped over them to come at her! A desperate hope flared in her mind. She swept around with a back roundhouse kick, stepped forward with two more quick kicks in rapid succession with her other foot, then dove and rolled under her shadow's counterattack and grabbed one of the spears dropped by the fallen Aiel. She swept it up and slashed with it, but this time not straight at her shadow. This time, she stepped out to one side, letting the light of the roaring fire cast the shadow of the spear into the space where her own shadow stretched out along the nearest tent face. To all appearances, she was swinging the spear through thin air, but the jolt of impact ran up her arm, as though she had hit something with the haft, and her own shadow clearly staggered backward.

"All right, B!!" a familiar voice cried. Faith had worked her way out to one side of the fire and had witnessed what Buffy had done. Buffy winced. The scraps of Faith's tunic lay burning to ashes a few paces away, leaving her bare to the waist; she had to have thrown the liquor on the fire at point blank range. Her sister Slayer's pale skin was riddled with bruises and burns, but she was still on her feet, and her eyes were defiant still amid the smoke and tumult.

Faith ducked and slid, grabbing another spear from one of the fallen. Her own shadow was nowhere in sight—Buffy wished it had been destroyed in the sudden flare, but Faith herself was still casting no shadow on the ground, so it must have survived somehow—but several nearby Aiel still wrestled or stabbed wildly at their own shadows, and she lay into them with abandon, seeming to dance around the fire with the spear, but every move using the blazing firelight to cast the shadow of the spear into one of the possessed shadows of the Aiel. Few of the Aiel still remained in fighting condition, but those who did began to see what Buffy and Faith were doing. It was still awkward, trying to hit a shadow with the shadow of your own weapon, flickering and dancing as those were in the firelight along the uneven surface of the nearby tents and ground, but for those who until moments earlier could do nothing but try to stay alive, it at least gave hope enough to stoke new fires in exhausted limbs.

Suddenly, Buffy's Slayer-sense tingled, and on top of that, her hair crackled. Lightning flashed overhead in a cloudless sky, scattering some shadows. Buffy turned to see Alsera and Nandrys striding through the tents. Brilliant balls of white fire like stars plucked from the sky were in their hands, and the shadows shied away from them.

Buffy's breath of relief was short-lived, however. The shadows were not destroyed by the light. They vanished from the ring around the campfire, but they were not gone; she could see them still moving in the shadows behind the tents, and in fact some had somehow grown, the stark, steady light of the Wise Ones' lights stretching some of the remaining shadows to four or five times the size of their original owners, as if projected against a massive, sheer surface at a distance. Buffy cursed. She didn't see her shadow among the new, giant ones, but she had little time to worry about that; she had larger problems, literally, at the moment. The Wise Ones' lights kept the giant shadows at bay, and she, Faith, and the Aiel clustered near them, thankful for the gift of a small area where the shadows could not come at them, but there was no way out of the circle without walking right into the shadows again. There was no end to this!

Abruptly, there was a rough wind, and a whirl of leaves converged on a spot near the fire, coming from everywhere at once, resolving into the form of Willow.

"What took you so long?" Buffy shouted.

"This!" Willow replied. Argent light erupted around her, and a stiff wind arose from nowhere, sending Willow's hair rippling out behind her in a radiant stream that seemed more like a wild, waving plume of energy than human hair.

The coals in the fire flared brighter than ever before, and lifted into the air, drawn into the whirlwind screaming in the air around Willow. Buffy ducked and rolled out of the way, pulling three Aiel with her, including Nandrys. Buffy vaulted to her feet a heartbeat later, and saw that the coals had been ground to powder around Willow, tens of thousands of tiny particles circling the blazing form of Willow Rosenberg like a sea of stars circling the heart of a galaxy.

Then, with a sharp, powerful cry, Willow sent the sparks radiating outward from her in a furious storm of blazing white flecks, each speeding faster than the eye could follow, rending tents and shadows alike. A ripple of dark flashes signaled the living shadows disintegrating left and right, and Buffy looked around to see shadows appearing again beneath the Aiel fighters, both those still on their feet and those who lay dangerously still in the harsh white light. She saw Faith's reappear, too, just before the wind faded and the last of the silver missiles was flying away from the corona around Willow.

The silence was deafening when it returned. All the sparks around Willow were gone, though the soft light continued to shine about her.

"Everyone's shadow back where it belongs?" Willow called, looking around.

"Oh, crap," Faith groaned.

Buffy turned again. Faith's shadow was back where it belonged. At first she thought that the raven-haired Slayer's injuries, and her half-nudity, might finally be catching up with her, but Faith wasn't looking at herself.

"Oh, crap," Buffy echoed, and looked down at herself, already knowing what she would see. Willow's light shone around Buffy, in front and behind her, as though there were nothing where Buffy stood but empty air. Buffy's shadow was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, there it goes!" Faith cried, pointing at something over Buffy's shoulder. Buffy swung around to see a familiar silhouette slipping away through one of the farthest visible rows of tents, a row only visible now because Willow's barrage had collapsed two tents that had stood in the intervening space until heartbeats ago.

Without thinking, Buffy launched herself into a full sprint, her feet barely touching the ground as she hurtled over the pockmarked ground towards her fleeing shadow. Where was it going? Every other shadow had simply mindlessly attacked its owner; this one was running, as if it knew something. Was it just her mind, or did it seem just a hair more solid, not just a blank shape on the walls of the tents it passed? It was making a beeline for the stone city of Rhuidean, and Buffy swore an oath. It would have an endless number of places to hide amid all those towering palaces of stone, but there was no way she could catch it before it made it there. It was every bit as fast as she was, and it had a head start.

She passed the first row of palaces into the stone city, slowing her pace reluctantly. There was still enough scattered light for her eyes, but there were massive patches of shadows—normal shadows—that would have provided her own possessed shadow perfect cover. Nevertheless, she glimpsed traces of movement in the weak light that told her that her shadow had reached the edge of Rhuidean and kept right on running. She bounded after it. Her eyes narrowed as she ran; the thing didn't appear to be looking for a place to lay an ambush. It was making a beeline for the heart of the city, where the great stone tree and the forest of crystal columns lay, where she had glimpsed the odd assortment of items scattered around the vast square. She redoubled her speed towards the square; even if that weren't her shadow's ultimate destination, the extra light there would make it a better place for a battle than here on the dim streets. Fortunately, there were plazas with massive fountains and other open areas in the route to the square, so she never needed to run down any truly dark alleys.

She reached the square and cast her eyes about, quickly settling on her target. A lone, detached shadow moved over the relics scattered around the square. The relics! Her eyes bulged. There were even more of them here than had been in her dream, many more, twenty, thirty, a hundred times as many more. There had only been a handful in her dream, and she realized now that they had not been arranged throughout the square in some pattern that had eluded her. They had simply been where they were in the waking world, hidden among hundreds of other items ranging from massive stone and metal frames the size of small cottages to rings meant for a the little finger of a child, or a very small woman.

There was no time for gaping, however, as her shadow suddenly straightened. Apparently it had come here looking for something, as if drawn to it somehow, and whatever it was, it had found it. As Buffy darted across the square, there was a rushing sound, and a whirlwind of dark energy swept up and around her shadow. It cleared a moment later, just as Buffy was closing with the thing, and Buffy saw that it had found the wide, thin jade bracelet inlaid with silver stones, near the base of the building where Buffy had hid in the dream the night before. The bracelet on its wrist, it turned to face her.

_Its wrist?!_

Buffy barely had time to think before her shadow turned toward her at last and leveled a vicious punch into her abdomen; Buffy twisted aside at the last instant and threw out her arm, but her shadow still scored a bruising blow on Buffy's forearm. Buffy backed away, and her shadow flowed after her. More than just her shadow now, she realized. It was solid enough to actually have a wrist capable of wearing a bracelet; it was no longer just a flat shape stretching itself off the nearest surface. The light no longer affected it the way it previously had, stretching the thing's arms out or suddenly causing it to be standing differently, the way it had against the fire. That meant that it was not suddenly going to become ten times its current size, but there was no mistaking that it had taken a step further into the living world. It was still colorless, featureless, and noiseless, but it was no longer shapeless.

Back and forth across the square their battle raged, though it was eerily silent save for the pant of Buffy's own breathing and the scrape of her sandals across the stone. At least the thing could be hit now! On the other hand, it also had a much easier time hitting back, and it still hit every bit as hard as she did.

She feinted towards her shadow's head, then ducked and stepped in low, leveling two quick punches to her assailant's stomach, the first one a quick jab that she knew would be blocked, the second a much harder blow, a rising driver punch that sent the shadow flying backward through the air. It vanished behind an artifact that looked like a large trunk in the shape of a giant oyster, but reappeared a moment later. Buffy's eyes widened, and she jerked aside wildly as a spinning plate flew right through where she had been standing an instant earlier. She rose to see her shadow descending upon her from above; it had sprang from the ground to a tall fluted pillar to the wall of the nearest palace and down at Buffy's head, its foot spinning forward to catch Buffy hard across the jaw. Stars flashed before Buffy's eyes, but she twisted backward quickly enough to get a high roundhouse kick of her own in while the thing was still in the air, and it spun out of its flight, catching itself awkwardly, bent backwards so that both its feet and one of its hands were on the ground. Buffy took the opportunity to drive her fist down, straight through where she guessed the bridge of its nose would be, knocking it flat on its back.

Her shadow took blows to the head as easily as Buffy herself, however, and when she tried to follow up her blow by stamping her foot onto the thing's throat, it seized her leg around the ankle, twisting to throw Buffy off her feet. Before she landed, she felt her shadow grab her ankle again, and this time it swung her up into the air, spinning furiously once, twice, like a hammer thrower, eventually sending Buffy flying towards the stone wall of the palace twenty feet away.

She caught herself softly on the wall, ten feet off the city floor, as if it were solid ground. For a split second she hung there, balanced on the wall, looking down at her opponent, which looked as surprised as a shadow could look. Then she sprang forward off the wall, reaching for her opponent. The thing knocked her arms aside, but she was ready for that and followed with the rest of her body in a shoulder bash, throwing them to the stone. The impact of the ground against her assailant's back while Buffy herself landed squarely on her chest added another blow, and she skidded several paces across the stone with her shadow pinned beneath her as well.

A soft but penetrating crackle broke the silence of the fight, and a white beam of light swept across the square from Willow's upraised hand. It struck both Buffy and her shadow at the same instant; the shadow flinched away, but was not broken apart like the others had been.

The beam had been enough to get the shadow's attention, however, and it turned to launch itself across the courtyard at Willow, whose eyes were wide in shock that her ray had had so little effect.

Fear welled up in Buffy's throat, of the kind that she had never felt for just herself. _Willow!_ "No!" she cried, grabbing the first thing that came to hand, a midnight blue crystal orb the size of a softball, and hurled it at her shadow's back. Her aim was true, catching the shadow where the base of its spine would be and sending it sprawling, not two strides from where Willow had been trying vainly to back up and get out of the way. Buffy was on top of it an instant later. She wasn't entirely sure how it was that the shadow had managed to resist that light, but there was definitely one obvious answer. She drove her shoulder once into the back of her shadow's skull, crushing the lightless figure's head to the flagstones, then wrapped one hand around the jade bracelet and rolled away, tearing with all of her might. The bracelet ripped loose; the shadow-made-flesh seemed to lose corporeality as it did so, so that the moment the bracelet was slightly dislodged, it tore free as if passing through no more than smoke.

"Now, Willow, now!" Buffy cried. Now that the thing was just a shape on the nearest surfaces again, there could be only instants before it vanished into the infinite shadows of Rhuidean.

Willow needed no second encouragement, and neither did Alsera, Nandrya, or Dainya, who had all arrived in the intervening few seconds. Brilliant white light burst forth from them like stars, and not just from them, but from every surface within fifty paces, banishing all shadows in the area for a brief instant. Buffy's shadow stood outlined darkly in the middle of the brightness for a split second longer, then shattered into a thousand motes of darkness. When the light faded and Buffy's vision returned, she looked down to see her shadow back where it belonged.

"Stay," she growled, shaking her head in wonder and bewilderment. The fire of adrenalin was beginning to fade from her veins, and the enormity of what had just happened was beginning to sink in.

She wheeled on the Wise Ones. "Tell me this kind of thing doesn't happen all the time here." She was furious, and trying to make herself sound furious, but she couldn't keep a distinct note of pleading out of her voice.

Alsera's shoulders sagged, no more than an inch, but for her, that was saying something. "Until three years ago, never. Since then—more and more often, I am afraid. 'Bubbles of evil,' an Aes Sedai traveling with the _Car'a'carn_ once called them, drifting free of the frayed edges of Sightblinder's prison until they burst upon the Pattern. These are just portents of what is to come if the last seals are broken and Soulcrusher is loosed upon the world again."

Buffy turned to Willow. "Any of that make sense to you?"

Willow's expression was helpless. "Bad things happen here, and worse is coming."

"Well why didn't she just say so?"

"She did say so."

"No, she said something about bubbles. Evil bubbles."

"I simplified."

"All right, whatever. Where's Faith?"

"Your friend is safe," Alsera finally managed to assert her presence. "_Gai'shain_ are seeing to her injuries. She should not even have been able to walk, but she still nearly ran down here after you. I imagine you'll see her in the sweat tent, if not before."

"Sweat tent?" Buffy asked, puzzled. And why was Willow suddenly blushing to the roots of her hair?

"It's—um—how the Aiel take baths," the redheaded Wiccan replied.

That only reminded Buffy that she did in fact need a bath, and in the worst way. She still had not bathed since before fighting the Turok-han, more than a day ago now, not to mention three battles and a lot of walking. She must have smelled worse than the boys' locker room after Sunnydale High football games.

"Alsera, that bracelet—what is it?" Willow asked, and if Buffy hadn't known better, she would have thought that Willow was trying to change the subject more than to get information.

"A good question," Alsera answered. "It has some connection to _Tel'aran'rhiod_, but more than that, I cannot say."

"Tele-what?"

Alsera fixed Buffy with a surprisingly sharp look, and Buffy felt a flash of anger. Did she actually expect her to know what the woman was talking about? Then Alsera continued. "_Tel'aran'rhiod_. The World of Dreams."

Buffy froze, her mind racing. If Alsera clearly thought Buffy knew something of the World of Dreams, that had to mean that the woman had seen through their disguises somehow on the previous night. Then again, perhaps the woman had just found the two of them lying asleep in their tent in the dreamworld, when she and Faith had made no attempt to hide their natural forms. "Like I'd really know it was called that," she replied. "But I think I get the point."

"You what?" Willow said. "OK, now I'm lost."

"I'll explain later," Buffy said. "Right now, that bath sounds like a really good idea." There was that blush creeping up Willow's face again!

* * *

**  
Author's Notes:** Thanks again so much to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, and who's been giving me feedback the whole time! You know who you are.

_Tombadgerlock:_ I'm pretty sure the 12th and final book will still come out; RJ finished the manuscript before he passed away, and I think it had already been sent in for proofreading and editing. I could be wrong, but I heard it through the grapevine. Won't bring the master back, of course, but I think we'll get to see the end of his magnum opus. I certainly hope so, anyway.

_Jen:_ Give books 7-11 a go. 7 and 8 are worth it. 9 and 10 are slow ... just slog through them. (If you decide to skim, you'll miss a few big events but not as much as you might think, actually.) 11 is a treat. RJ was back on form, IMHO.

_Joe:_ I know, I don't think I've found a completed BtVS/WoT crossover that wasn't a one-off or really short fic, and the Wot-verse doesn't really lend itself to "short," not with the main series topping 4,000 pages and the spinoffs adding more.

_Janusi:_ Sorry, already too many characters to work in without the Cheeseman making an appearance ... :-(

_era:_ Amen.

**Coming Soon:** Chapter 5, "Accommodations." The Earth trio are exposed to a few more unconventional customs of the Aiel, and the Wheelverse unleashes a few more surprises for our interdimensional heroines. A few more canon WoT characters begin to appear as news of the newcomers spreads on the whispers of dreams and rumors.

**Sneak Preview: **This is the worst night of my life,_ Faith seethed ... She wondered if they were always this harsh, or whether they were just getting frustrated and taking it out on her in order not to show anything. The Wise Ones had even admitted that it would do no good to shock her or frighten her out of the dreamworld, since that wouldn't be a very reliable way for Faith to do it on her own in the future—it was purely to ensure "proper diligence," in their words. _Diligence?! Like I'm not trying?!

_ "Trying is good," Bair intoned sagely. "Succeeding is better."_


	5. Accommodations

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there'd be a case full of Omega watches on my vanity. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND:**All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 5:**

**ACCOMMODATIONS**

"Oh, you have got to be _kidding!_" Buffy burst out before she could control herself.

"I tried to warn you," Willow answered morosely.

"No, you just blushed like a virgin," Buffy countered acidly.

"Whatever, it's not like they have real baths here."

"They've got a friggin lake right there!"

"Oh, give it a rest, B," Faith laughed. "Gonna have to get used to it sooner or later." The raven-haired Slayer was apparently as comfortable in nothing but her skin around complete strangers—there were two men in the tent!—as she was with just Buffy in the tent the previous night. For some reason, Buffy found her surprise—well, not that difficult at all to contain.

Buffy seethed, but the fact was that there was no way she could leave the sweat tent without actually bathing—or sweating—since it did actually seem to do a passable job of cleaning the dirt and grime off one's skin, if Faith was any indication. The younger Slayer had been in the tent for a while now and was just about to leave, and her skin and hair had definitely recovered some of the luster that three battles without bathing had taken. Still seething, she began to peel her stained and sweaty rags away from her skin. No sooner had she done so than one of those white-robed _gai'shain_ took them and vanished.

"Hey ...!"

"Relax," Faith said. "You didn't actually see anyone leaving the tent naked, did you? They'll bring you something clean."

"Anyone ever told you you have no shame?"

Faith gave a saucy grin in response. Buffy gnashed her teeth.

Several of the Aiel were trying to hide grins. Buffy guessed that they knew their hygiene habits weren't exactly the norm, and were enjoying watching her stew. _Grrr!_ Nevertheless, the tent was warm and the steam was welcome after the parched desert air. She wouldn't have minded half so much had the steam tent not only been communal, but coed. At least the Romans separated the sexes. At least, she was pretty sure they did—but then again, she had never been the best history student, despite all of Willow's valiant efforts.

A few minutes later, another woman in white did appear with a fresh set of clothing for Faith, loose pants, a close-fitting undershirt, and an open-front desert jacket, all of lightweight _algode_. Buffy took heart at that; at least Faith was right about not having to leave the tent naked. She should have been able to concede that without having to see it in person, but the events of the last twenty-four hours—well, the last seven years—had made her perpetually suspicious.

No sooner were Faith and Willow gone than Alsera and Nandrys arrived. Buffy did her best not to look as the Aiel women casually shrugged their clothing aside, but found it hard; after all, there was really nowhere else that it was safe to look, and she wasn't about to close her eyes. Several of the other Aiel rose as the Wise Ones entered, however, including both of the men, though whether that was because of custom or because they were all finished, Buffy had no idea. In the end, however, only Buffy, the two Wise ones, and two Maidens of the Spear were left in the tent.

"I take it in California, people bathe in wetlander fashion?" Alsera asked.

"You mean as in, with actual baths? And privacy? Yeah, kinda," Buffy answered acidly. She had been looking forward to a real bath to recover some of her mood, and having to settle for a communal sauna wasn't quite what she had in mind, though now that there were no more men in the tent, she found that it was not nearly so unpleasant.

"An interesting land, California must be," Nandrys noted, "to produce such warriors amid such lushness. Most women of the wetlands here are soft. Most of the men, too."

Buffy chuckled mirthlessly. "I don't think ours are much different, mostly. I'm the one that's different. Well, me and Faith." And others. How many others? She might never get a chance to know at this rate, but she wasn't going to give up on getting back to Earth so soon after being torn away from it. "Sometimes I wish ..." she trailed off.

"You wish you could be like them?"

Buffy sighed. "Sometimes. But I couldn't. Not after seeing what's out there."

"'Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain,' I believe the Borderlanders sometimes say."

Buffy nodded. "Being a ... being able to do what I can isn't much fun sometimes. I'm twenty-three years old. Most girls in my school are just now finishing college, finding themselves husbands, starting families and careers. I get to kill things, until one of them kills me."

"And yet you want to return to that."

Buffy looked up and met the Wise One's eyes levelly, and her voice never wavered. "It's not an issue of what I want. That's what duty means. If my life were all about what I want, I'd be hopping in a minivan and driving my kids to soccer practice now. And thousands of people would probably be dead." She rose. Somehow, a signal must have been given, since a white-robed _gai'shain_ appeared at that moment with a fresh change of clothes for her.

"Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain," she repeated, half to herself, though still loud enough for the others to hear. Memories of her brief rest in the afterlife floated unbidden to the surface of her mind—the white pillows of soft clouds, the watery radiance that had leeched away at the darkness of her soul. Or at least begun to do so, before its work was cut mercilessly short. "Understatement." Having to take up the mantle of responsibility of the Slayer again after getting to set it down once was more than anyone should ever have to bear, and yet now that she was back among the living, her self-preservation instincts were as feral as they had been before she had learned that death was not the enemy she had always believed it to be. Duty. It was simply her duty to stay alive, because thousands, maybe more, would die if she didn't, so she fought to live. That was all there was to it. The Wise Ones' expressions as she left the tent were unreadable, and she wondered if she had said more than she should have, but the warmth and her weariness had massaged the words from her lungs, and she was beginning to feel something of a kindred spirit among these Aiel; they probably understood her life better than just about anyone in California. At least they knew something of a life with a weapon in one's hand, and maybe even a little something about bearing more responsibility than was fair to ask a person to bear. They at least had not tuned her out when she spoke of the subject.

Faith was waiting back in the tent they shared, and there was a third pallet in the tent now, too. Apparently the Aiel were letting Willow rejoin Buffy and Faith, though the red-headed Wiccan was nowhere to be seen. Faith gave Buffy a grin as she arrived. "Enjoy your bath?"

Buffy nodded noncommittally. "We need to find this _Car'a'carn_ person of theirs. Or anyone else who can work these Portal Stones."

Faith laughed. "Just like that, huh?"

"There has to be someone in this place, somewhere, who can get us home."

"Relax." Faith stretched languidly on her pallet as though it were a feather mattress. "We're here with the smartest woman in thirteen dimensions. We'll get home eventually, as long as we keep her alive. And in the meantime ... well, look around. No shortage of bad guys to kill here, either."

"Don't start looking for trouble."

"Since when have we ever had to look?"

"I really don't like you."

Faith's chest heaved with laughter beneath the coverlet. She took a deep breath to calm herself. "Seriously, though, look around. If it turns out we can't get home for a while, not the end of the world. We could do a lot of good here."

Buffy was dumbstruck. "Faith, listen to yourself! You know what's going on here?"

"A war," Faith answered simply. "Pretty big one, too, from the sound of things."

"Right, a war! A war, Faith! That's not something you can just get involved in and get out of whenever you want! Listen to me, Faith. We—do—not—belong—here! These people have their war, and we have ours! This war isn't ours. This _world_ isn't ours! Our duty is to our world. Not this one. Remember that."

Faith sat up, and her voice bristled. "Our _duty_," she snapped, "is 'to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness,' if I'm remembering that right, and it looks like they're here, too. Plus, think of the past week. Our world is safer than it's been for thousands of years, and going to get even safer as all the newbies gain experience."

"Or less safe as they all get killed."

"You are such a downer! Giles and Angel will find them, and they'll have dozens of veterans to train them."

"Veterans of one battle."

"A veteran is anyone who's killed one enemy and watched one friend die. Never mind that they had Sergeant Summers whipping them into shape for weeks. They know Rule Number One of Slaying by now."

_Don't die,_ Buffy finished the thought. "You ought to think about that rule yourself, when you start thinking about getting involved with wars here," she added, acidly.

"Look, we may not have a choice. This Tar Valon place, apparently some kind of witch city or something, well, that's one of the places right in the middle of it right now. We want to go there to look for people who know how to work those rocks, we just might end up having to go through an army to get there. Maybe two."

"Right, and that reminds me of another thing," Buffy added. "Humans. Human armies. Killing freak shadows is one thing, but you're talking killing humans."

"I don't know," Faith countered. "Just saying. The witch-city is apparently under siege, or was when the last news came in. And this chief of theirs apparently manages to attract as much trouble as we do. Maybe more. There may be no getting out of fighting if we want to get out of here."

"Then we'll deal with that when we have to," Buffy finished bluntly. She looked around. "Where'd Willow go, anyway? Didn't she leave that strip club with you?"

"Oh, is that what it was?" Faith grinned. "Wish I'd known, I could've had a little more fun."

"Faith."

"No clue," Faith answered. "Said she was going down to the lake right after we left, hasn't been back."

"Eh. Whatever," Buffy said. "You packin' it in?"

"Think so," Faith said. "I got bit more beat up today than you. Oh, speaking of Rule Number One, we might want to take turns sleeping—much as I hate to say that."

"Done," Buffy answered immediately. "I can't sleep, anyway. You take the first four hours, I'll take the next. I was going to wait for Willow, anyway."

Faith murmured something in response, but whatever her words were, they didn't make it past the edge of her pallet, and the soft rise and fall of her breathing was the only sound in the tent a moment a later.

---------------------------------------

Faith was standing again. Buffy was not in the tent, and the mysterious half-light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere was there again. _I'm back_, she mused. She looked down and found herself wearing the black leather pants and close-fitting cami top that she had worn for just a moment the night before, though the stilettos had been replaced with low-heeled boots that would be easier to move around in. She grinned. _Buffy talking about the sweat tent like that got me in a good mood_.

She knew that she had only four hours to sleep, but she had learned to rest quickly while in prison, and this dreamworld was too new and exciting not to explore. Never mind that anything she learned now might make the difference between life and death later. There was always that.

She was only steps from the entrance to the tent, however, when a voice spoke to one side. "Do all women of California dress like that?"

Two silhouettes detached themselves from the shadows from whence the voice had come, resolving into the figures of two women, each wearing the shawl of a Wise One. They were both tall, as were most of the Aiel, blue-eyed and silver-haired; they did not appear to be sisters, but something about them spoke of a connection that flowed deeper than blood.

"Only the ones who can get away with it," she replied offhandedly, still not sure which of the two had spoken.

One of the women shook her head in bewilderment. "I have wandered into worlds that could only exist in dreams, but I fear I shall never understand this California of yours." That voice marked her as the one who had spoken before. She was the younger-seeming of the two, though her hair was all but completely white, and Faith guessed she was a lot older than she looked, merely having aged more gracefully than her companion.

"Don't think we've met," she noted.

"I believe not," the woman replied. "I am Amys, of the Nine Valleys sept of the Taardad Aiel, and this is Bair, of the Haido Shaarad. We are in Caemlyn at the moment, so it is indeed not likely that you would have found us walking the streets of Rhuidean."

Faith shook her head. "Where?" Had Buffy mentioned something about wherever that place was? She remembered Tar Valon—that was the City of Too Many Willows, where someone might have some clue about how to get the three of them home—but she had not paid much attention to any of the maps she'd gotten a chance to see. There would be more than enough time for that once they were on the move, after all. It was hundreds of miles to wherever they were going, if they were going anywhere.

Amys and Bair shared an inscrutable look. "A city in the wetlands," Bair spoke after a moment. "Seat of Andor."

Faith shrugged.

"Alsera tells us that you are considering going to Tar Valon. Is this true?"

"Apparently," Faith admitted. "I don't make the travel plans. Just go where I've got to go and see that we all stay alive to get there, and this is apparently the place where someone might have a clue of how to get us out of here. Unless your super-chief shows himself."

Amys' mouth tightened. "The _Car'a'carn_ hides his whereabouts even from us, even in his dreams," she said. Faith could tell that the woman was trying to avoid grating her teeth. "Though he finds ways enough to send his orders to my husband."

"Amys is husband to Rhuarc, Clan Chief of the Taardad," Bair added, as if that explained everything. Faith made a note of it—it sounded important—but it was all Greek to her at the moment. Did that make Amys some kind of Aiel noble? Faith had seen nothing to suggest that they even had any such ranks. Wasn't Alsera wife of a Clan Chief, too? How many of these Clans were there?

Faith shook off that line of thought. There were bigger things on her mind. "Look, this dreamworld of yours is pretty cool and all," she said. "But I don't suppose you could teach me to _leave_?"

Bair raised an eyebrow. "It's true, then, that you cannot on your own?"

"Not without being shaken awake. I just want a normal night's sleep—if those even exist in this world."

Amys sized Faith up. "I do not know," she admitted. "You are—different—than Egwene al'Vere. Times have changed greatly in the last two years as well. Our time in Caemlyn grows short. Even if you could reach us tomorrow, we would be gone before long. Even in less than two days, you must have noticed that our world marches to war."

"I kinda got the picture," Faith admitted. "But I was hoping you could teach me right here. Doesn't look like I'm going anywhere."

Amys and Bair looked at one another. "It is not our way to instruct those who have not given themselves over to us as apprentices," Bair said at length. "Some secrets cannot be only half-learned. But perhaps we can make an allowance for this. That knowledge is the least dangerous in_Tel'aran'rhiod_—if only because it takes one away from the all the other dangers of this place."

"I got it," Faith admitted.

Amys was giving Bair a hard look, as if she had offered too much too fast, but made no further move to challenge the other woman.

"Reach out with your mind," Bair instructed. "You should feel a connection to your own body, your sleeping body in the waking world."

Faith tried to imagine what it meant to be 'reaching out with her mind;' the only thing that came to mind was an image of Yoda, and she was relieved that the little green Muppet did not actually appear in the dream at that instant. She tried concentrating as hard as she could, and then tried the opposite, letting her muscles go slack, breathing evenly. She had taken a couple of yoga classes at Sunnydale Fitness Center a while back, while she was on a free trial membership, but not much was coming back to her. Or, at least, not enough to allow her to sense a connection to her own body from within an alien dreamworld—which, she admitted, had not exactly been part of the beginner program there.

She shook her head. "Not feeling anything."

"Concentrate," Bair continued firmly. "Know that your body is there, as surely as your mind knows that your hand is there when you're awake. Feel it. Reach for it."

Faith felt. She reached. She felt and reached nothing. She had no idea how long she stood there in the dream, with those two stern women watching her, silently, owls examining a mouse, before she gave it up.

"I'm sorry," she said, taking deep breaths to control her frustration. It would do no good to let it out on these women—for one thing, they didn't deserve it, and for another, they were probably a heck of a lot stronger than her in this place. They knew what they were about, and they could leave whenever they wanted. "I know you were just trying to help."

Amys' eyes were stern. "You give up after five minutes? My guess is you have at least half the night before your friend wakes you."

Faith's eyes bulged. "I'm not going to just stay here banging my head on the wall all night! I'm going to get nowhere trying this. You said yourself, I'm different from normal, whatever the hell 'normal' is here."

The white-haired Wise One's eyes didn't soften so much as a whisker. In fact, they glittered as if made of frozen crystal. "Perhaps. But even if you might be ready to give up so easily, _I _am not. I do not take being mocked so lightly."

"Mocked? No one's making fun of ... gyaaah!" the last came as she felt the air shift suddenly around her, and suddenly she was somewhere else. Somewhere without any ground underneath her. Her eyes widened for a moment, before she started falling. As she tumbled forward in the air, she saw the camp—a thousand yards below her, if not more. _They teleported me straight up!_ She gritted her teeth to bite back a scream. She knew they were listening, and she wasn't going to give them that satisfaction, even though the ground rushing up toward her was the most terrifying thing she had seen in—well, a day or two, she thought with surprising calmness. The Turok-han army had definitely been a few notches scarier. That didn't make the ground any less dangerous, though, not unless a parach—

"Urk!"

She jerked upward. _Well, I'll be damned! A parachute!_ It had literally appeared out of thin air around her as soon as she had thought of it, already fully spread out above her.

She glided down the rest of the way, remembering what she had deduced about this dreamworld, this _Tel'aran'rhiod_, the previous night—that one's will had tremendous power here. Thus, she kept concentrating on the parachute the entire way down, _knowing_ it was there, just in case one or both of the women below decided to try willing it away. She didn't feel anything that felt like such an attempt, however, and the Wise Ones were waiting for her silently as she glided in. She let the parachute vanish a moment after she landed and rolled to her feet, turning quickly to face them but making no move after that. She wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of seeing her gibbering, either with fear or with rage, though there was definitely more than a little of both in her veins at the moment. She would never have admitted the former to herself even had it been there.

"Impressive," Bair noted. "Crude, but impressive."

Faith met the woman's gaze levelly. Did the woman think that she had just invented it on the spot? "I'm not going to ask if you were just going to let me fall all the way or not."

"Don't be absurd," Amys replied stiffly. "We would never kill over so mean an insult. But if you actually _were_ my apprentice, I'd have you strapped until you cursed your mother for ever looking fondly at your father."

"I think I had you in seventh grade," Faith noted.

------------------------------------------------------------

Buffy stood silently in the tent until she was sure that Faith was asleep, then slipped quietly outside. She asked the first few Aiel she saw if they knew where Willow had gone, and eventually found herself pointed in the direction of Maglor Egan's wagons. It was after ten, but apparently peddlers here—or at least this one—were open for business whenever there was business to be had.

Willow was not hard to find. Maglor's six wagons were arranged in a circle, the front of each facing outward so that the doors on the back of each wagon faced into the center of the circle, where a large fire crackled. A small handful of other Aiel, including Melainda, one of the Maidens of the Spear that had either taken an interest in them or been asked to keep an eye on them—probably both—were also still perusing some of the peddler's wares. Even at this hour, business had to be good. There were only ten thousand Aiel in the encampment, nowhere near the population of even a small Los Angeles suburb, but Egan's bazaar on wheels was also the only shop in town, and most of time, there wasn't even one. A gentle slope ran down from the far side of Maglor's wagons. Willow was there, sitting near the top of the slope, with something by her side that looked like a large, tan watermelon.

"You just buy that?" Buffy asked, drawing alongside. Willow nodded absently. She seemed to be concentrating on something else. In fact, she seemed to be concentrating on the fruit.

Buffy's eyes narrowed. "With what? They don't exactly take Visa."

Willow smiled, looking over at Buffy for a moment. "One of Egan's assistants had come down with heatstroke. I helped them treat it. The Aiel kind of believe in natural selection—I'm not such a fan. Apparently neither was Egan."

"So what is it?"

"Called it a _hiari_gourd. Apparently it's like a watermelon that really knows how to pull and store water, like a cactus—grows east of here and is really popular west of here."

"The Aiel were feeding us for free, you realize," Buffy pointed out.

Willow nodded. "I know. But I think it might be time we returned the favor. These people are all about debt and obligation. Doubt they really think they look down on us, but I think it might be time to show them a little something."

Buffy was puzzled. "Think we already did that with the shadows, didn't we?" Buffy wasn't going to say it aloud, but she had actually felt more charged during the fight with the shadows than she had defending Earth from the Turok-han. There was something about this place that just somehow let her let loose a little bit more. Maybe it was simply the fact that it was so obviously foreign a world.

Willow grinned. "Maybe. But everyone here can fight. Not everyone can do this. In fact, I'm not sure I can. I just want to feel ... to try something." She had clearly changed what she was going to say.

Buffy's eyes narrowed. Willow had that over-eager researcher look in her eye, from when she was young and first discovering her talents in the ancient arts. "Don't do anything stupid."

"I hope I'm not," Willow answered. "But it doesn't matter. This ... this is more important."

"Fruit is more important? Look, don't get me wrong ..."

"Hope this is about more than that," Willow cut her off. Buffy's eyes widened. Willow wasn't usually so assuming. "Here," Willow continued. "Think you can break that open for me? Don't eat any, though," she added.

Buffy took the melon. It was at least as heavy for its size as any watermelon. Willow must have had a heck of a time carrying it even this far. She shrugged, stood, and cracked the thing with both hands across her knee. The rigid tan husk cracked like an eggshell, and drops of red juice dripped onto the desert soil. That, at least, looked exactly like the inside of the watermelon, right down to the rows of dark seeds. She handed the two jagged halves back to Willow.

"Thanks," Willow answered. She immediately began plucking every seed she could reach out of the _hiari_, rolling up her sleeve to dig for those buried deep in the melon. Chunks of fruit came away and fell to the earth as she dug.

"Um ... Willow?" Buffy wasn't exactly starving, but the fruit did look pretty good after all the rough grain breads, mixed nuts, and other simple fare the Aiel had been providing. At any rate, it wasn't like Willow to be so wasteful.

"Leave it alone," she replied, continuing to dig until she had a double handful of seeds, which she laid out on a small scrap of cloth in front of her. She took a few deep breaths. "All right," she said. "Buffy ... stand back." A brilliant, verdant light blossomed in her pupils.

Buffy knew better than to argue. _Dammit, Will, I hope you know what you're doing!_ She grated herself for not talking some sense into the girl before she started whatever the heck it was she had just started. She backed off to the top of the hill as quickly as she could, however.

Willow was facing her, up the hill, but not looking at Buffy. Just slightly over Buffy's shoulder, towards the heart of Rhuidean. Buffy turned, wondering what—

_Oh, tell me you're joking._

Willow's eyes were locked on the great tree in the heart of the city, its great branches of trefoil leaves spreading above even the great stone palaces of the ancient settlement.

She swung back to look at her redheaded friend, just in time to see Willow curl her fingers into claws and make a raking motion. Ten shallow furrows tore into the hillside, five on either side of Willow. Buffy turned over her shoulder again, already sure of what she would see; Willow had not bothered to be subtle, and in fact might deliberately have chosen to do this in one of the more public places in the tent city. The Aiel that had been with the wagons had all stopped their shopping and were gazing openly. Buffy noted that Melainda was not among them; no doubt the Maiden of the Spear had gone running for Alsera and the other Wise Ones as soon as Willow had begun invoking her power openly. Buffy had an idea of what her friend was up to now. She wondered how it would go over with the Aiel.

She turned back to Willow. The furrows had closed, and the seeds were nowhere to be seen. Buffy sensed Willow gathering herself, taking a few more deep breaths, and she felt a tingle on her skin everywhere it was exposed in Willow's direction.

Then Willow began to sing.

Buffy had heard Willow sing before. The demon Sweet had come to Sunnydale and turned it all into a musical hell, and Willow's voice had been one of the more lamentable on that lamentable day. Bluntly, the girl might have been a genius, but she couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, and she had no stage presence. She had practically shrunk into herself whenever one of her lines in Sweet's sick opera had come, her stage fright showing through even the preternatural force of Sweet's spell. Willow's voice now was so far removed from that that she wondered if it could even be the same person. The voice was clear, vibrant, and lush, even if the words were unintelligible. It was like listening to a live Adiemus concert, complete with harmony and accompaniment. Music floated on the wind, seeming to spring from everywhere and nowhere. Out of the corner of her eye, if Buffy half-closed and unfocused them, she thought she could see the vague shapes of humans, and even something that looked like a tree with arms and legs, gathered in a group behind Willow; the ethereal harmony might well have been coming from them.

There was nothing ethereal, however, about the vines that suddenly sprouted along the mounds of earth that had been heaped over the furrows. They seemed to clamber out of the ground like men buried alive triumphantly breaking free of the earth—even more so, Buffy reflected, since Buffy herself had done that herself once and definitely not looked so healthy at the time. Melons ballooned along the vines, first the size of golf balls, then breadboxes, then full-grown, every seed in the original melon brought to full maturity in mere minutes.

Eventually, the vines stopped growing, the wind died, and the harmony faded. Buffy tried to see the vague outlines of whatever it was she had seen before, but they were nowhere to be found now. Willow was still standing, facing the great tree in the distance, breathing hard. Buffy could hear her breathing effortlessly because there wasn't a single other sound to be heard. _Hiari_ fruit by the score clustered on the hillside around her, though there was still a small, clear patch on the ground around Willow herself.

"Light preserve us," she heard a fervent whisper nearby. Buffy turned to see Alsera, Nandrys, Caithryn, and two other Wise Ones standing there. Alsera's features were well-schooled, but the other four had eyes wide with naked shock. Buffy shook her head. Willow had nearly destroyed the entire Earth at one point. Growing a patch of desert watermelons didn't seem so imposing by contrast. In fact, she wondered why this was so much more impressive than the firework show Willow had put on the previous night against the shadows run amok. Nevertheless, that certainly had occasioned no reaction like this.

Willow still had not moved, or done anything other than breathe. Screwing up her courage, or perhaps just not even caring anymore, Buffy picked her way through the melon patch toward her.

"You all right?" Buffy asked.

Willow didn't answer. She just kept breathing. If anything, her breathing was even faster and deeper now than it had been during the spell itself. Had she been like this, there was no way on Earth—or wherever the hell they were—that she could have sung like that.

"Willow?!" she called again, louder. Still no reaction.

She reached out a hand to take Willow's, and there was a brilliant green flash of energy. Buffy was thrown back off her feet, tumbling over one _hiari_, and spots danced across her vision as her head thumped into another of the hard melons. Fortunately, her skull had grown relatively thick over the years.

The discharge seemed to have finally snapped Willow out of whatever she had snapped into. She collapsed backward, folding to settle into a cluster of _hiari_ that had arranged themselves like a low bench or divan. Buffy scrambled to her feet and approached again. Willow's breathing was still coming in ragged gasps, her chest heaving and her eyes fluttering and distant. It was hard to tell in the dim moonlight, but she thought there was a flush to Willow's cheeks.

"Willow ... Wills, you all right?"

Willow turned to look at her weakly. There was a warm smile on her face. "Wow," she said. "That was ... just wow." She crooked one finger and held it to her lips absently. A low, sultry, throaty laugh escaped her lips, and suddenly Buffy's entire perspective of what was "wrong" with Willow changed, and she found herself trying to keep herself from laughing as well—and failing miserably. She grabbed another nearby _hiari_ fruit and broke this one across her knee as well.

She could feel the twinkle in her own eye as she held out one of the halves to Willow and asked, pointedly, "so ... breakfast in bed?"

With a helpless grin, Willow took the half offered her. Then she flicked her fingers, and the other half flew out of Buffy's hand and squashed itself down over the Slayer's head.

----------------------------------------------------

_This is the worst night of my life,_ Faith seethed. That might not be entirely true—the night her first Watcher died would be hard to top—but at the moment, she was not thinking entirely rationally, and making no apologies for that fact. Why anyone would willingly become an apprentice of people like this full-time was beyond her. Amys in particular made Buffy seem a lax and overly cuddly taskmaster. She wondered if they were always this harsh, or whether they were just getting frustrated and taking it out on her in order not to show anything. The Wise Ones had even admitted that it would do no good to shock her or frighten her out of the dreamworld, since that wouldn't be a very reliable way for Faith to do it on her own in the future—it was purely to ensure "proper diligence," in their words. _Diligence?! Like I'm not trying?!_

"Trying is good," Bair intoned sagely. "Succeeding is better."

_Bitch_, Faith grated inwardly. She carefully made sure that that one didn't actually escape her lips.

She was lying prostrate on the ground, waiting for the next inane order from Amys or Bair when she realized that the two were talking, and not to her. She raised her head and opened her eyes. Bair and Amys were talking with a third Wise One, whose form was just a hair less solid, less distinct, than the others. The third Wise One seemed excited, even awestruck, about something. Faith didn't even care to think about that at the moment, she was just grateful for an opportunity to catch her breath.

A minute later, Amys turned back to Faith, and Faith sighed. _Break's over!_ But Amys' mind was clearly elsewhere than it had been before the other Wise One had appeared, much as she did a good job of hiding it. "I am sorry," she said, and surprisingly, she actually sounded like she meant it. "We must leave you to fend for yourself for the night. Your friend should be waking you soon."

_Great,_ Faith mused. _And here I've gotten absolutely no rest at all._ Then again, waking would be more restful than another hour with these two. "It's OK," she replied. "I ... I know you were doing your best."

"And perhaps we shall do even better on another occasion," Amys replied. "You are strong in the dream, and have some of the same determination that Egwene al'Vere possesses. I would not lose you to the perils of_Tel'aran'rhiod_ just yet."

"Don't worry," Faith said. "I wouldn't lose me to them, either."

Amys and Bair gave predatory grins, and then, between one moment and the next, they were gone.

Faith turned back into the tent. _Think, dammit, think_, she grated to herself. _You can't leave. You can't leave when you go to sleep in the waking world, and you can't fight when you go to sleep in this world, and you can't sleep in the open ..._

_Hide._

She didn't like hiding, but she had no problem with it when doing otherwise would go against Rule Number One of Slaying. _Don't die, _she reminded herself. Anything that came across her here could kill her while she slept. Anything could come across her here with no warning because distance didn't matter. _Bottom line: don't let anything come across you._

_So where? How?_ There was nowhere to hide here. Even if she could find a cave or something around here, for all she knew she'd find one with a dream-dragon in it. Where would she hide, if she could hide anywhere? Well, the only place she had ever considered a real place of refuge, even for a moment, had been at Angel's place in the basement of the Hyperion in Los Angeles, but that was a little out of ...

The tent around her swirled, and for just a moment, she thought she could see the rough wooden pillars and stone walls of Angel's erstwhile lair floating in the dark. _It can't be!_ The moment the thought crossed her mind, the scene vanished, and she was back in the tent. But it had been! It was! _Hyperion,_ she thought. _It _was_there! I saw it! I know you're there! I know I can reach you!_

The tent swirled again, and the basement of the Hyperion came into focus again. Stronger, this time. Emboldened, Faith fixed the image of that basement in her mind. Everything. The little refrigerator, where Angel had kept his meager stash of pig's blood to stave off his nocturnal hunger. The decrepit old stereo system and Angel's treasured vinyl collection. The little cot in the corner where Faith had slept the night before Kate came for her. The rickety stairs up to the little hallway off the lobby of the hotel. Each detail solidified the image in front of her, and when she took a step forward, it was like she passed through a membrane of some kind—from where, she had no idea, since it hadn't felt like stepping from the sandy ground inside the tent—and she heard and felt the familiar_thump_ of her heeled boots striking the cement floor. _Wow. Just ... fricking ... wow._ Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder.

She was tempted to go look around the rest of the hotel, but she was already completely exhausted. She made sure that the door to the upstairs was locked, that her trusty knife was on the nightstand within easy reach, and killed the lights.

What seemed to be moments later, she felt herself being shaken awake.

_Dammit!_

"You're kidding," Buffy gasped when Faith explained what she had done. It was exactly what Faith had said after Buffy had explained what Willow had done, at least as well as she could explain it. Willow herself, once again allowed to lodge under the same roof as the Slayers, had already gone to sleep.

"I don't know if I was really like back in dream-Earth or not," Faith said. "But it at least felt safer than the tent."

"I can imagine," Buffy said, already thinking of her cozy bedroom back at 1630 Revello Drive in Sunnydale. It couldn't possibly be that easy, could it? After all, even if there was a "dream-Earth," it would probably follow the same rules as this dream-Wherever that they had fallen into every night since coming to this foreign world. Something could come up on them unexpectedly there as well as here. It was possible that wherever Faith had gone wasn't really the dream reflection of their own world at all, just a little piece of Faith's own dreams or memories, but still within the bounds of this strange world and its even stranger dreamworld that seemed to suck them in every night.

Still, there was only one way to find out, and she was already tired enough that she was going to end up finding out in short order whether she wanted to or not. The battle with her own shadow—and the fact that the previous night's sleep had not been exactly restful—had more than taken their toll on her stamina.

"All right. Wake me in three," she said.

Faith nodded.

Buffy felt herself sliding asleep even before she hit the mattress.

Almost immediately, she found herself standing in the tent again, with no memory of standing up, and that ethereal half-light coming from everywhere and nowhere casting the inside of the tent in that ghostly radiance.

_Just passing through,_ she noted. Immediately, she began to recreate an image of her own room in her mind. The dresser, with Mr. Gordo standing sentry on top of it. The window where Angel had climbed in—or she had climbed out—more often than she could remember. The closet that concealed her stylish yet affordable wardrobe. The mirror where she had sat to style her hair for prom night—or where she and Angel had looked and seen only one of them looking back. The trunk with Mr. Pointy and his friends. As each detail floated back into her mind, the tent began to grow a little less distinct, like a picture shifting out of focus, and the image of her room in Sunnydale grew more and more solid around her. Eventually, she took a step—she didn't feel that sensation that Faith had described, of passing through a bubble, but she was there. The familiar feel of the carpet on her bare feet greeted her, and she looked down to see herself dressed in her favorite pajamas from Earth. From Earth. It felt strange thinking that. _I'm an alien from Planet Earth. I come in peace. Take me to your leader._

So was it real? Was it Sunnydale? Cautiously, she strode to the window and looked out. It looked like Sunnydale. The front yard looked the same as she remembered. Revello Drive looked the same as she remembered. There was the neighbors' obnoxiously large SUV, and the yellow fire hydrant, and the school bus stop sign ...

She clapped her hand to her head and backed away from the window. _School bus?! _Memories of the flight from the school in the school bus, with Robin Wood's foot on the pedal, flooded back into her mind. _This can't be real! What the heck was I thinking? Sunnydale doesn't_exist_ anymore!!_

And yet here it was. This was her room, exactly as she remembered it. And yet, it was also clearly _not_ here. The same ethereal unlight bathed everything; even the sun outside seemed indistinct, more like a hazy blob, the outlines of which were impossible to define, than the familiar blinding yellow-white disk.

_So now what? Do I risk going to sleep?_ Faith clearly had, and had managed to emerge unscathed, but that might well have been pure luck. Just because you slept in the woods once without getting eaten by a bear didn't mean there weren't bears out there. And bears here could appear out of thin air. Yet there was no way she could go forever without sleep. Three hours a night were all she needed, but she needed those three hours.

In either case, there was no way she was going to sleep yet. Her nerves were too on edge, though her Slayer-sense was quiet. That was a plus. She hoped that sense still worked in this place, but it had worked well enough the previous night, and she was more inclined to trust her instincts than her eyes in a place like this, anyway. She did a quick search of the house, noting the familiar themes of the Aiel dreamworld: the less bolted down something was, the less likely it was to appear. There had never been a time in all the years Buffy had lived here where both the refrigerator and the pantry had been empty, but they were, and all the cupboards were devoid of china and silverware. Outside of her bedroom, even the furniture was missing, though it appeared when she concentrated hard enough, fixing it in her mind exactly where and how she remembered it—it took a lot of effort, however, and if she was at all uncertain of just how a given piece had been oriented, it didn't appear at all. What _had_ been on the mantle other than those pictures, anyway? She couldn't quite place it, and the dream didn't seem overly inclined to help.

The electricity worked, she noted as she flipped on the basement light. _I'm getting electricity in a town that doesn't exist in a dreamworld that doesn't exist from a power plant that probably doesn't exist either. Stranger things have happened. _She imagined that a lot of people would have gone completely insane by this point, but after coming back from the dead twice, one's standards for what qualified as unacceptably weird tended to shift somewhat. The basement told a similar story to that of the rest of the house: the water heater was there, but very little else. It was almost like it was a new house, or one waiting for someone to move in.

"What is this place?" a strong voice behind her demanded.

Her Slayer-sense had tingled only an instant before the voice spoke, and she dove headlong across the basement to gain room, the Scythe springing into her hands as she sprang to her feet. She turned and settled easily into a battle-ready crouch, the Scythe held low to one side.

All hope that she was not in some corner of the Aiel dreamworld vanished. This newcomer, whoever he was, clearly did not hail from Earth. The man was taller than her, but not by much, with a swarthy complexion and thick, broad features. Two massive swords hung across his back, though one thick, muscled hand already clutched the hilt of one of them, ready to bring it into play. Armor of rigid leather covered his torso and upper legs and arms, which in turn looked strong enough to crush stone.

He regarded her warily. "Oho?" he said. "Not disappearing on me? And you look like you might even know how to use that ..." he trailed off, and a look of concentration crossed his face. "I know you, don't I?"

"Pretty sure you don't," Buffy replied icily.

The man released his grip on the hilt of his sword. "No, I think I do," he said. "At the very least, I know Sineya's Scythe when I see it."

If Buffy had been any more surprised, the ancient weapon might just have tumbled from her hands. Never in a thousand years would she have expected to hear the name of the First Slayer cross the lips of anyone from the Aiel world. "Got a name?" she asked.

"You don't know me?" he asked. Buffy fixed him with a steely gaze. "No," the man continued, seemingly unaffected. "I see that you don't. The Wheel weaves patterns beyond the ken of even the wisest, and I would never dare rank myself among them. But regardless," he said. "Call me Gaidal. Gaidal Cain."

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Sorry it's been so long between updates! I promise to do better, however low that may be setting the bar. Thank you so much for all your feedback, it means the world to me, especially given that this is a somewhat less common crossover world than HP or SG-1 or LotR.

_Joe:_ I don't think you need to worry much on that score; there are already too many characters in Randland for me to consider bringing the whole Scooby cast into the picture.

_elf:_ Xander with a _shoufa _around his head ... fun thought!

**Coming Soon: **Chapter 6, "Where One Belongs." One of the main characters of the WoT-verse finally enters the picture—and, not surprisingly, takes a somewhat immediate interest in the mysterious newcomers.

**Sneak Preview:**

_Willow's eyes narrowed, just before Egwene's eyes locked with hers. She was no politician, but her mind was working even if her body was not. Maglor Egan had mentioned something about paying careful attention to the words an Aes Sedai spoke, to be sure that you didn't merely allow yourself to hear what you wished to hear, rather than what was said._


	6. Where One Belongs

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there'd be a Tesla Roadster in my driveway. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 6:**

** WHERE ONE BELONGS **

Buffy stood still, watching the intruder in her dream-home for a long minute after the sound of his name died out. The name meant nothing to her, but the way he said it suggested that he expected it to mean something to her. Probably some famous warrior in the Aiel world. Those swords were not decorative, and he clearly knew how to use them.

"I'm sorry," she said. "But I still don't know you, and this is my house. I'm gonna have to ask you to leave." In truth, she really wanted the man to stay, wanted to find out how he knew of Sineya and the Scythe, but she wasn't about to start sharing her own secrets, especially her vulnerability here.

Gaidal returned her gaze levelly. "Your house?" he replied languidly after a moment. He looked around. "_Tel'aran'rhiod _belongs to all and none. The only things here that are truly yours are the body and spirit that you bring with you, and if you aren't careful here, even those can be taken from you."

"Hm, you think maybe by people who barge into others' homes uninvited?"

She saw him mouth the word _barge_ and think for a moment before responding. "I meant no intrusion, but you need to hear what I have to say. If you want me gone before then, you'd better use that." He nodded at the Scythe in her hands. "And use it well."

Buffy sized him up. It was tempting. But perhaps the direct approach wasn't called for here, much as it had its appeal.

"I don't have all night," she said at length.

"I won't take long," he said. "But the more I stand here, the more I'm convinced that I _do_ know you, even if you don't. I recognize Sineya's mark on your spirit. And you do, too. Don't even pretend to me that you've never heard that name before."

"I know the name," Buffy admitted. "But I'm not her. She died eight thousand years ago in my world."

"Eight thousand?" Gaidal seemed surprised, but shrugged a moment later. "Time is not the steady stream for which it is oft mistaken," he noted. "She vanished two thousand years ago in this world. The Horn called to her, and she did not answer. We have practically forgotten her over the years."

"Horn?"

"Ah." His eyes sparkled, as though Buffy had just given something away, though for the life of her, she could not understand what. She had already made it pretty clear that she didn't come from this world, so why should it be so surprising that she didn't know what horn he was talking about? "The Horn of Valere calls us forth, those bound to it by our deeds in the waking world in ages past, to fight the Shadow, weaving us out into the waking world and returning us here, to _Tel'aran'rhiod_, when its call is ended, awaiting our next rebirth. Sineya was one of us. For a brief time. Then she vanished. We thought she might have been claimed by balefire, but there was no evidence of that, and few knew the secrets of balefire by the end of the Trolloc Wars."

"So you're what? Two thousand years old?"

Gaidal chuckled. "What is age to a dream?"

"So you're not dreaming."

"Now? I do not dream. I am a dream. But I see that you are not. You are here, somehow, now, and fully grown. You should be a baby sucking at your mother's breast if you just now returned to the world of flesh."

"OK, little TMI there," Buffy noted. "And I wasn't just born here. Does this look like anything you have here?" she gestured around at the basement around her ... the electric lights, the washer and dryer, the smooth concrete floor, the water heater, the breaker box.

Gaidal, still apparently puzzling over the meaning of "TMI," shook himself and looked around. "No," he admitted simply. "I have never seen the like."

"So I'm not Sineya. I'm sorry. I don't belong here. I belong in _my _world. I have people there who need me, and who are going to be worried about me."

Gaidal nodded. "Perhaps," he said. "But I would hope that what I just told you would prove that things are not so simple. I'm sure you have a place in your world. By your age, Sineya was already well on her way to earning the heron, and designing her own weapons as well. Including that one."

_Sineya designed the Scythe?_ Buffy was almost hurt. She hadn't the slightest clue about how to design a magic weapon. Was that supposed to be in the Slayer Handbook somewhere? _Hmph._ "Things have to be simple," she replied. "Letting things get complicated is how you get killed."

To her surprise, Gaidal threw back his head and roared with laughter. "You have Sineya's mind as well as her spirit. She would have said nothing different." His eyes narrowed and sharpened. "Be careful. Sineya let her dislike of complexity lead her to a dark place before she vanished, along with the rest of Aridhol. Some lines were not meant to be crossed, even in fighting the Shadow. Then again, in all her lives, Sineya was never much for playing by the rules, so I probably waste my breath."

It was Buffy's turn to laugh, though hers was more restrained than Gaidal's. "We do have a lot in common. But I'm really not here to cause trouble. I just want to go home."

Gaidal smiled. "I wish you the best of luck in finding your true home," he said. "Perhaps we will meet again in the dream." Without further warning, he vanished.

Buffy was silent for a long time after Gaidal left. Sineya. The Scythe. And some other things that she was less sure of. Rebirth? Horn of Valere? The heron? Aridhol? A dark place? _The power of the Slayer is rooted in darkness._ She thought she had solved that mystery. The shamans of prehistoric Africa had blended the essence of a dark, ephemeral demon with a young girl of their tribe, creating the First Slayer. Now she wasn't so sure anymore. Did that make sense? The power of one demon and one girl against thousands of demons and vampires throughout nearly eight thousand years of Earth's history? For that matter, a demon somehow allowing a human to be reborn, or a demon itself being reborn, to create the line of Slayers, a line that had nothing to do with actual ancestors and descendants? She had always chalked it up to just "magic" and shrugged it off, but she had been around magic—and demons—long enough by now to know that even in the magical world, some things were less credible than others. Had that black essence actually been a demon? Had creating the First Slayer and the line of Slayers that would follow her been so simple? Humans were infected with demons all the time. Vampires were such a hybrid. They didn't come back when you killed them.

So what, then? Shamans of eight thousand years ago on Earth sucked a girl away from two thousand years ago here? Well, stranger things had happened. Bitter memories of being sucked out of the tranquility of the afterlife surfaced, but she buried them quickly; she was trying to think, not wallow in some of the darker corners of her past. Besides, it wasn't like the girl had been sucked out of Heaven; she had been sucked out of this world. A living world.

Or a dreamworld.

Gaidal hadn't said _where_ Sineya was when she vanished, she realized. Had she been here? If this dreamworld could possibly touch Earth, and Sineya had been here, not in the waking world of this place, when the shamans performed their little ritual, would that have done it? _A dream._ Sineya could have been like Gaidal—here entirely, not just when her living body was asleep. _Awaiting our next rebirth._ Gaidal had hinted that he had been born and died many times as well, and that there were others, others associated with this Horn. Maybe Sineya had died before being called by the shamans on Earth? Or maybe not. It was obviously possible to get from this world to Earth, or at least from Earth to here, while still alive—the shamans had not had a Portal Stone that she could see, but that didn't mean that there weren't other ways to get back and forth.

_Ugh. Too much thinking._ And too many unanswered questions. She sighed. There was no help for it. She returned to her bedroom to go to sleep. She was too exhausted to look out the window, where she might have seen the faint shadow of a man descending across the lawn in the silvery moonlight, the shadow of a stocky man with two crossed blades on his back, unmoving and watchful.

* * *

The sun had still not fully crested the eastern rim of the valley of Rhuidean when Willow awoke, staring at the ceiling of the tent she shared once again with the two Slayers, but the bustle of the camp gave her the impression that she had slept late, anyway. All the Aiel were already awake, as were Buffy and Faith. Those two could operate on so little sleep, it was unfair. Then again, it had been equally unfair of fate to shoulder them with the burden of trying to work a normal job during the day and as the Slayer at night, so perhaps there was some balance there, but there were times when she would have given anything to have their stamina.

Not that she was feeling all that tired. Far from it. In fact, she felt more alive than she had in years. Ever, even. It was that tree. Something about it sung in her veins. It radiated energy on a scale she had never seen on earth, a second sun that she could have pointed straight towards with her eyes closed. If the British coven where she had gone for "rehab" had ever heard of the like, they had never shared the secret with her. Nor had Giles. On Earth, she would never have dreamed of even attempting the display that she had given the Aiel last night. Here, it had almost been second nature, almost as if the lifeforce of the tree was pent-up, waiting to be tapped, to use her as a channel—she was under no illusions that she had been the one in control of whatever rite she had performed last night. The tree was not sentient, but it had a primal will of its own, operating at a far deeper and more irresistible level than human thought—a will born of purpose, inexorable as the turning of the seasons or the rising of the sun. The thing had been burned! Blackened! Had it been possessed of even more power before then? If it had, she might want to be grateful for the damage; her head was already swimming, and she didn't want to think what an even greater power source might have done to her. Or had the burning been of no real import, a mere cosmetic scar, touching only the meaningless facade of the tree's true essence?

She stretched, and her hand touched something unfamiliar, something alive. It was soft, moist, and surprisingly cool. She sat up quickly. A thin circle of mushrooms had blossomed around her overnight, pushing up through the sandy soil of Rhuidean as though it were a shady forest glen. She shook her head. _We need to get out of here._ Not just because they had to get home, but because they had to get out of Rhuidean. She did, at least.

Somehow, they must have known when she awoke. A white-robed _gai'shain_ entered the tent after only another minute, bearing a bowl of something that might have been oatmeal sweetened with—what else—_hiari_ gourd. When the man left, she ate quickly, and slipped back into the clothes Alsera had given her, a lightweight, sandy _algode _dress with baggy sleeves and sturdy leather shoes.

When she left the tent, she intended to just find someone to ask where Buffy and Faith had gone, but Alsera was there, waiting. "Walk with me," she said. She turned and glided off among the tents. Willow followed.

"That song you sang last night," Alsera asked. "Where did you learn it?"

"The song?" Willow had expected questions about growing the gourds, but this was the last place she would have expected to start. "I didn't. Those weren't words. Just ... music. Part of the channel for the power."

"I see. Where did you learn to sing it, then?"

"I didn't, either," Willow said again. "It just ... happened. I just kind of went with it."

Alsera took this in. They walked another several steps in silence. "Do you control it? Or need to?"

Willow was so startled that she missed a step. How much did Alsera know? "Control what?"

"Whatever power it is that you use. Does it have a name?"

Willow shrugged. "I guess it has a lot of names. Most people call it 'magic,' but I'm not a huge fan of that word. But I can't think of a better one. And ... well, of course you need to control it. Otherwise ... I don't know. But it can't be good." Her mind flashed back to the dark period in her life when she had definitely _not_ been in control. Definitely not good.

Alsera smiled. "You know nothing of _saidar,_ am I right?"

"Is that what you use?"

Alsera nodded. That glow appeared around her again. Willow was starting to see it more clearly now, without having to exert her eyes, though she still had no idea what it meant. She wondered if the woman were even aware of it. A moment later, a small ball of fire appeared, hovering in the air above Alsera's upturned palm.

"_Saidar_ is the female half of the True Source, the force that turns the Wheel of Time, which weaves the Pattern of Creation," she explained. "But seizing, controlling that power ... if you try to grapple with it, to wrestle it, you will feel like you're wrestling a sandstorm. You can't grapple it, but it can swallow you." As she spoke, the ball of fire flickered and became green, then blue, then white.

"But you're controlling it now, aren't you?"

Alsera smiled. "The flows, the weaves, yes, I suppose, but they do not come from trying to bend or force _saidar_ to my will. Opening oneself to _saidar_ is a supreme act of submission. You don't reach out to it; you let it fill you, and then ride the flows, ride the wind of them, and then, only then, you find that you can guide them to do as you will. _Saidar _will not fill those who fight it." Her smile sharpened. "That act of submission is ... not easy for some of us, at times." Willow grinned. She could imagine; Alsera was a commanding woman. Hearing her talk of submission to anything was strange.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You can ask," Alsera replied lightly.

"Is ... _saidar_ ... stronger in Rhuidean?"

"Stronger?" Alsera's look was puzzled. "_Saidar_ is everywhere and nowhere. It exists outside of place and time. I have heard tell of places where it is difficult to sense, but such places are rare, and are usually in some way separated from the world as well."

Willow nodded. She appreciated what Alsera had been trying to say about _saidar_, and how it could not be fought, only guided, but she was talking about something different than the great tree, since its power would almost certainly fade with distance. And it very much existed in this world, not outside it, though it might exist beyond this world as well.

"My power is different," she confirmed. "It comes from within the world, not outside it. Everything in the world has power of its own—objects, places, natural forces, people, words, actions, feelings, everything that makes up who we are and the world we live in. I know how to use that." She reached out her hand, and a small stone leapt into it. "It's not 'everywhere and nowhere,'" she continued. "This stone doesn't exist outside this valley. Its aura, its presence, doesn't affect the world much farther away than we can see from right here. There are things I can do in some places, or some times, or with some people present, that I can't do otherwise.

"That weapon I used against the shadows? I would have a hard time pulling that off in a Buddhist temple. Erm ... a really peaceful place full of really peaceful people, probably one that's been that way for hundreds of years."

Alsera smiled. "The Three-fold land is not such a place."

"Actually," Willow replied. "Rhuidean feels so peaceful, I can't even begin to explain it." She turned a wry gaze on the older woman. "The battle fury I put into those coals came from Faith and Buffy. And from you. Well, Aiel, anyway."

She had wondered if it were safe to tell Alsera that, and only her nagging suspicion that she would have almost no chance of putting a lie, or even a significant omission, past the Aiel Wise One convinced her to say that. That, and the fact that her concentration had been off ever since she first laid eyes on that great tree rising above the palaces to the east. Alsera's reaction surprised her; the Wise One threw back her head and laughed. "I trust we had more than enough for that," she said. She sighed, and her expression sobered. "You would not be so surprised to feel the peace of Rhuidean had you been here four years ago. A great deal has changed since the coming of the _Car'a'carn_." A distant but sharp look entered her eyes, and Willow guessed that there was definitely a story there—probably several novels, in fact—but something told her that this was not the time or place to ask.

"I believe your friends want to leave for Tar Valon soon," she continued.

Willow nodded. "I think we've done all we can here. No Portal Stone guru is going to just show up here." _Plus, I need to get away from that tree._

Alsera nodded in agreement, and the two of them walked silently for another minute or so. The Wise One left her as Buffy and Faith came into sight, once again picking over the supplies at Maglor Egan's wagons.

* * *

The gathering of Wise Ones in _Tel'aran'rhiod_ had grown past the point when the tent they used as a common area could hold it. Word begun to spread of the strange women who had appeared on the slopes of Chaendaer, in the very spot where the _Car'a'carn _himself had first returned to the Three-fold Land. Alsera had thus moved the meeting to her home at Shiagi Hold, where there was both more room and less risk of being spotted by Buffy Summers should she happen to return to the tent city in the dream. There were easily forty in attendance tonight, including Amys, Bair, and several of the others who had followed the _Car'a'carn_ until his recent vanishment. As for the two warrior-women themselves, it was a near-certainty that Buffy Summers was somewhere in the dream, as her body slept soundly in the waking world, warded by her spear-sister, and her dreams were nowhere to be found. The odds that she slept dreamlessly tonight were, in Alsera's mind, little higher than the odds of rain in the heart of the Waste tomorrow. She did not sleep in that strange bed of brass in their tent in the Rhuidean tent city tonight, however. Alsera had been able to sense that Buffy had appeared there, but then left, and her trail, though not subtly concealed by any stretch of the imagination, faded into darkness through which Alsera was not sure if she could follow, and she was considered above average among the dreamwalkers. Perhaps Amys might trail her through that. Or, she conceded grudgingly, Egwene al'Vere, if the wetlander woman had learned as much as distant rumor led one to believe. Buffy Summers still hadn't the faintest inkling of how to cover her tracks in _Tel'aran'rhiod_, but she had directed herself to a murky and distant corner of the dreamworld, a long way from the world that Alsera knew, where the tenebrous swirl of the dream itself was enough to deter the Wise One from following.

Alsera was not the only one with news of the two foreign women to share. The news that Amys and Bair had attempted—and failed—to teach Faith how to leave the dream at will was news to Alsera as much as it was to anyone else.

It was not the foreigners' strange dreamwalking abilities—or liabilities—that burned in Alsera's mind most tonight, however, nor Willow Rosenberg's ability to channel a power of which no Wise One—and likely no Aes Sedai living—had ever witnessed. It was what Willow Rosenberg had done with that power the previous evening, something that was about to convince her to break one of the strictest taboos among the Wise Ones and Clan Chiefs.

"I have one last favor to ask," she said, primarily to Amys and Bair, but directing her voice so that all the Wise Ones in the wetlands could hear.

"Of course," Amys replied, arching an eyebrow. Wise Ones were seldom so hesitant as to ask permission merely to ask for a favor. Alsera, in particular, had little need to ask—her standing with the others here was higher than all but perhaps four or five, though Amys was one such.

"Tell me ... do the Lost Ones still pass near Caemlyn?"

Like nearly all corners of _Tel'aran'rhiod_, the phantasmal hallways of the White Tower were ghostly silent, save for the occasional hint of an unidentifiable rustle in the distance that might have been no more than one's own wandering imagination. Egwene al'Vere had become accustomed to the silence of the dreamworld in the years since her first baby steps into that world, but there was something all too brooding and oppressive about the atmosphere in the dream here. It was not the awe-inspiring, pristine stillness of the deep wilderness, nor even the deserted emptiness of normal cities like Tanchico. The atmosphere in the dream here reflected the weight of the mistrust that had poisoned the Tower—all the more since Elaida had risen to power. The halls of the Tower were broad and high, and opened frequently onto broad windows and grand balconies, yet the dream reflected the world as people made it as much as the world as it was shaped by boundaries of stone and sky. The air here was as heavy as in the Heart of the Stone in Tear. The Aes Sedai under Elaida distrusted even each other, a terrible truth given that the presence of Egwene's own army on Tar Valon's doorstep should have united them against her, if nothing else. The fact that it had not was part of what gave her hope that she could turn them back to her side, unite them once again, and make the Tower whole and hale in time for the Last Battle. Tarmon Gai'don would not wait on the squabbling among the Ajahs to work itself out.

She still was not entirely sure in her mind whether Beonin had betrayed to Elaida that Egwene had been dreamwalking freely, and thus able to roam the Tower and communicate with her army outside its walls, even as her body slept in the bowels of the Tower's dungeons. Nevertheless, even if Elaida were aware, the usurper Amyrlin had been unable to ward her, or even to shield her own dreams. Egwene had not yet taught Beonin that weave before the Gray sister had betrayed her to Elaida.

Elaida's dreams were turbulent and fitful, though so scattered as to be uninformative regarding anything more than the usurper's state of mind. That, Egwene noted with a somewhat shameful twinge of grim satisfaction, was far more anxious than Egwene's own, even though Elaida slept in quarters fit for a queen and Egwene languished in the dungeons.

Abruptly, a new presence entered her awareness, within arm's reach behind her. Then another. She tensed, but relaxed quickly. A warm smile crept across her features, which by itself lightened the atmosphere.

"Amys," she turned to give the elderly Wise One a warm embrace. "Bair."

"Is it safe to talk here?" Amys asked.

Egwene raised her arms lightly into the gloom. "This is my home," she replied.

"That is not what I asked," Amys replied, the light spark in her eyes robbing her barb of most of its bite. "Besides, your home is full of rats, both with and without tails."

Egwene laughed mirthlessly. "Alcair Dal?"

Amys nodded, and Egwene willed herself to the bowl-shaped valley in the Waste where Rand had first proclaimed his identity to the Aiel. She set herself down on the same ledge where she had stood before, only a few steps from the man himself. She looked at the star-speckled desert sky, remembering what it had been like to see that crystal void darkened with thunderclouds, the first time in most of the assembled Aiel's lives they had ever seen such a phenomenon. Rand had summoned them as a somewhat blunt way of getting the Aiel's attention. The Aiel had threatened to riot after he had revealed to them that their past wasn't the forgotten era of martial glory most had always imagined it to be. The distraction had been successful, to put it mildly.

Amys and Bair appeared a moment later. "A new thread has been woven into the Pattern," Bair told her. "Three, in fact, which may find themselves entwined with yours before long."

Egwene listened, her wide brown eyes growing even wider as the Wise Ones told her of the mysterious newcomers that had arrived at the Portal Stone above Rhuidean, the warrior women whom the Power could not touch, the redheaded woman who could channel without seeming to touch the Source—while shielded—and who had grown a full crop of food right before their eyes. She allowed herself one moment of pure amazement, just to get it through her mind, before she reined in her thoughts again and began to consider what that might mean.

"And so they come to Tar Valon?"

Amys nodded. "The journey will be several weeks, I think, but we have told them that Tar Valon is the most likely place to find the answers they seek."

"The Portal Stones," Egwene half-whispered, more for her own benefit than the Wise Ones'. "I'm not sure even we have the knowledge of those stones buried in our library. I'm sure we don't have it in the minds of any living sister."

"They would like to meet you."

Egwene's eyes shot up. She hadn't been consciously lowering them, but she had drifted off into her own thoughts for a moment. "You told them about me?"

"Nothing about you personally," Bair replied. Her grin sharpened. "But they did ask for an audience with the Amyrlin Seat."

Egwene found herself giving a sharp grin of her own. It was good to have someone who didn't challenge her claim to the Seat either to her face or behind her back. Of course, as the perverse whim of fate would have it, that would have to be the Aiel Wise Ones—whose opinions of Aes Sedai in general were somewhat less flattering than almost any other group of people under the Light. What respect they gave her, she had earned as their apprentice, not been accorded because of her title.

She would never have had it any other way.

"Where are they?" she asked.

* * *

"How are you guys doing that?" Willow asked glumly, trying to force her form to ... well, form. Buffy and Faith both looked as solid as they did in the waking world. In fact, in some ways, even more so, as Willow could see shades of the power they held here that were hidden beneath the mundane robes of flesh outside the dreamworld. Granted, this was her first time in this world, but she didn't like looking down at herself and seeing almost nothing there. Her clothes had rippled between the Aiel garb and about ten different Earth outfits since she had been brought here.

She didn't dare even look at the tree.

Buffy had somehow managed to pull her out of her own dreams and into this place, at the very Portal Stone where they had entered this outlandish world. According to Buffy, all it took was an effort of will to bring someone here, indeed, to do almost anything here, but it seemed like Buffy and Faith could do a great deal here by sheer force of will that was completely beyond Willow. They could alter their clothing and even their bodies almost effortlessly, and hold them that way. Willow couldn't even keep her own clothes from shifting carelessly, sloppily, from one outfit to the next. Worse, her own form was misty and transparent, more solid than a hologram, but only barely. Worse than that, was that the enormous presence of the tree was a hundred times stronger here than it was in the waking world, or maybe it was simply that it felt stronger here because Willow herself felt so much more faint. Even avoiding looking at it, she was already fighting off a headache.

She was trying to avoid thinking that, had Buffy and Faith brought Willow into the dreamworld no farther from the tree than the Aiel encampment, instead of a half day's march farther away and beyond the threshold of the valley, her mind might have shattered like pottery in a rockslide.

"Good evening, strangers."

Willow turned to see a slip of a girl standing near the foot of the stairs leading up to the white stone base on which the Portal Stone stood. Amys and Bair had appeared beside her, but the newcomer somehow held all Willow's attention. She was shorter than either Amys or Bair, and in fact was no taller than Buffy. Her chocolate eyes shone with the light of both youth and experience, a rare combination, and soft brown hair framed her face. A slender green jersey dress with a flowing skirt framed a body that might have had a curve or two more than the Aiel women, but Willow didn't for a moment mistake this woman for soft. There was something about her that spoke of newly forged steel—young, perhaps, but bright and unyielding. A striped stole in seven colors draped around her neck.

"Um ... hi," Willow managed nervously, giving a hesitant wave. She felt extremely self-conscious being the only thing in evidence that was only half-here. The Portal Stone was as solid as Buffy and Faith, and for that matter, the newcomer was not far short of that. The tree, of course, dwarfed everything else. Even the unassuming rocks of the mountainside at least gave the impression of being here, of belonging here; they might as well have been the rocks in the waking world, had they been bathed in true sunlight instead of that soft, misty unlight that came from everywhere and nowhere in this place.

Buffy, apparently, felt no such strictures. "Hi," she said, stepping forward to extend a hand. "Buffy Summers. And this is Faith," she said, introducing her sister Slayer, who was stepping forward as well.

"Guys!" Willow admonished. This was supposed to be some kind of authority figure! You didn't just walk up and shake their hands!

The woman only laughed, and held out her own hand for Buffy and Faith. Amys and Bair's expressions were unreadable, but their eyes were lighter than normal. Of course, that wasn't saying much.

"I am the Amyrlin Seat," the woman introduced herself. "Most people in this world simply address the Amyrlin as 'Mother.'"

Faith choked back a laugh. "Mother?" she gasped. "Come on. You're maybe two years older than me."

The woman turned a look on her. Faith met the woman's eyes.

For maybe a few seconds.

"Tch. Whatever," she said as she shook her head resignedly and lowered her eyes.

The woman turned to regard Buffy, in turn.

Buffy held her gaze. Unlike Faith, she didn't turn away. The woman seemed to take note of that. After a long moment, without breaking eye contact, Buffy said firmly, if impatiently, "if you've got our ticket out of here, I'll call you whatever you want. Mother." She said the word, but there wasn't exactly the kind of reverence in the title that Willow had hoped Buffy would be able to muster. Or at least fake.

"We will see, child," the woman said before turning her rich brown eyes on Willow. "I will do all I can to see that you are not kept long from where you belong."

Willow's eyes narrowed, just before Egwene's eyes locked with hers. She was no politician, but her mind was working even if her body was not. Maglor Egan had mentioned something about paying careful attention to the words an Aes Sedai spoke, to be sure that you didn't merely allow yourself to hear what you wished to hear, rather than what was said.

She forced herself to meet Egwene's gaze. It was a challenge, but she refused to let herself look away, even though the woman's eyes made her feel as though she were wearing nothing but her skin. A thoroughly amused light entered the woman's eyes as the thought crossed Willow's mind, and Buffy and Faith's eyes widened in shock and horror. The look was only fleeting on Faith's visage, however, before it was replaced with an insouciant smirk.

Willow looked around at them, puzzled, before a horrible realization seized her, and she quickly concentrated on forming clothes around her again. Earth clothes, she decided. A simple linen dress of dyed natural fabric, one of Tara's favorites.

She let her humiliation ignite into anger, enough to meet the woman's gaze again. "My name is Willow Rosenberg, Mother," she said. "And where we belong is in our own world."

An icy gleam touched the Amyrlin's eyes as she said that, briefly slicing across the warmth that usually suffused the deep earthen pools, and Willow knew she had hit her target. _Where you belong_, the woman had said. Not _where you came from_.

Her words had touched Buffy, too, she realized, seeing the older Slayer tense, her knuckles whitening imperceptibly for a fraction of a second. An instant later, Faith replayed enough of the conversation in her mind to catch on as well.

"Perhaps," the woman half-agreed. Of course, half-agreeing and agreeing had nothing really to do with one another, Willow reflected.

A brief, heavy silence hung in the air. Then the woman sighed, though she did not release Willow's gaze, and Willow still forced herself not to lower her eyes. "I do not believe any Aes Sedai today knows the workings of the Portal Stones," the woman said. "But if that knowledge exists anywhere under the Light, it exists in Tar Valon. Therefore, Willow Rosenberg, is it not possible that, for the moment, where you belong is in the Tower?"

Willow's eyes iced. "Maybe. But it's also true that life can take us places we don't belong before it takes us where we do."

"The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills," the woman agreed. This time, the note of agreement in her voice was completely genuine, even though Willow had no idea exactly how that was supposed to amount to an agreement. "And enduring the trials of places we don't belong are part of how we grow into what we must become."

"OK, stop with the battle of the fortune cookies, you two," Buffy grated. "Can you help us or not?"

A warm smile touched the corners of the woman's mouth, belying the words that came out of it. "No," she said.

Willow nodded. "Thank you for coming to speak with us anyway, Mother."

"I was not finished, child," the woman replied.

Willow eyed the woman again, but held her tongue.

"I cannot help you," she said. "And the library of the Tower is open only to those who wear the ring," she continued. "But if you should decide to put on the ring and the white yourself, then perhaps you might be able to help yourself."

Willow's eyes bulged. "You want me to become a ... a ... an Aes Sedai?" she asked. "I don't think Amys and Bair told you, but I don't ..."

"I am aware that you possess an art of which we've never heard," the shorter woman cut her off. "But that does not mean that you cannot learn to channel _saidar _as well. You have the spark in you. I can feel it even from here, with only a small part of your spirit in _Tel'aran'rhiod_."

"Hate to break in," Buffy broke in, "but what exactly are we talking about here?"

"The Tower wants to offer a place to belong for all women who can learn to channel. If they have no societies of their own to belong to," she added, with a surprisingly deferential and apologetic nod to Amys and Bair, as though sorry she had thought of that only as an afterthought. "You have the spark born in you. Strong, unless _Tel'aran'rhiod _is truly addling my senses."

"It isn't," Amys assured her.

"Do you know what that means?" the Amyrlin asked Willow.

Willow shook her head.

"It means that you will eventually start channeling on your own, whether you wish it or not. Only about one in four women survive long after that without guidance. Some of the deaths are painful. Some are simply tragic—women burn themselves out and then lose the will to live. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes more than a year. Sometimes several years."

"We don't plan on being here several years," Buffy cut in.

"But sometimes it happens faster than that, doesn't it?" Willow asked. She needed no verbal confirmation. The Amyrlin had already hinted as much, anyway. "And unless we want to try raiding the Tower library, the only way into that library is to become an Aes Sedai."

The Amyrlin ignored the suggestion that they might break in, which, in Willow's mind, was a surer reason to write off that option than had the Amyrlin adamantly denied it was possible. The woman merely smiled sagely. "So you see," she continued, "perhaps, at least for a while, the Tower is indeed where you belong."

"If I say yes," Willow replied, holding up a hand to preempt whatever Buffy was about to say, "what then?"

"When a girl commits to the Tower, she becomes a novice. Novices who progress far enough in their studies test to become Accepted. From there, one must be selected to test for the shawl of an Aes Sedai, an even harder test, of more than mere control of _saidar_."

Willow smiled. "Thank you, Mother," she said. "But I kind of meant more immediately."

Egwene smiled back. "I am willing to accept you into the novice lists right here, child ... the actual novice book may not be here, but I think I can let the others know if you're coming, and I am willing to trust your word. If your word were not good, it's unlikely you'd be breathing now, given how you arrived here." Willow shrugged uncomfortably, but there was no way to argue the point, nor any sense in trying. "I may have some tasks for you not long afterward, before you can begin your actual studies in the Tower."

"And my friends?"

"They will not be welcome in the Tower as novices, but there are more people in the Tower than merely those who wear the ring. Any hand that can wield a sword is, unfortunately, too valuable in this day and age."

"So they can come with me to Tar Valon."

"They can come with you to Tar Valon. I cannot promise that you will be able to see each other often when your studies begin in truth, however."

Willow grinned. "They're not much for libraries, anyway."

"Hey, I spent a lot of time in the library!" Buffy countered.

"Seriously," Faith added. "I mean, I know we weren't _reading_ or anything, but give us some credit here, huh?"

Willow threw up her hands. "Then I accept."

The woman smiled. "Done." _Dear Goddess, what did I just sign on for? _the idle thought crossed Willow's mind. As it did, the Amyrlin reached her hand forward, and suddenly, there was a hidebound book in front of her, each page lined with the names of women and their parents and towns and countries of origin. Andor. Cairhien. Tear. Illian. Saldaea. Ghealdan. Shienar. Arad Doman. Mayene. Tarabon. Willow shook her head helplessly, but wasn't about to be completely outdone, even here where the woman was clearly in her element and Willow was equally clearly out of hers. She ignored the quill pen that the Amyrlin attempted to hand her and put her hand on the first blank line. There was a tiny but brilliant green flare along the page, and then the most recent entry in the novice book of Tar Valon read _Willow Rosenberg, daughter of Isaac and Sheila Rosenberg, Sunnydale, California_.

"Now, child," the Amyrlin continued. "There are some things you need to know, and I have your first task for you already. You have come to us at a rather ... difficult ... time. In fact, at the moment, I am a prisoner in the dungeons of the Tower."

"What?" Buffy and Faith burst out together. Willow's eyebrows rose, but she saved her breath.

"There is another woman who calls herself Amyrlin, whose name you may hear. Elaida do Avriny a'Roihan. Rest assured that she is _not_ the Amyrlin, and the Tower she usurped is beginning to fall apart around her. It may well be united again before you arrive—the crossing of the Waste is long, and I fear I may mean to burden you somewhat in that crossing as well. However, know that any Aes Sedai who profess allegiance to Elaida for the moment will bear you little love. Should you arrive before the siege of Tar Valon concludes, my army is the one camped on the banks of the river."

"River?" Faith asked.

"Tar Valon's an island," Willow noted. She had been studying enough of Maglor Egan's crude maps to know that much.

"'River?'" Buffy blurted. "I was more thinking 'siege!' But don't mind me."

"As I said," the woman continued. "Elaida's usurpation is coming to an end. But if you reach Tar Valon before then, take yourselves to Tiana Sedai and Sharina Melloy. Tiana is Mistress of the Novices. Sharina doesn't have a title or even a shawl, but she nevertheless has done wonders helping. A good woman, too."

Willow nodded. "Avoid Elaida and anyone working for her, get to Tar Valon, find Tiana and Sharina."

"Tiana _Sedai_ and Sharina," the woman corrected her, with just a touch of sternness. "You may have a craft beyond us, but while you are a novice, I will expect you to act as one. That includes showing deference to those who have attained the shawl, first and foremost."

"Oh. Sorry. Of course. Mother," she added nervously. She had always been anxious about getting scolded. Some people could just brush it off, but she had never been one of them. It was amazing how quickly she had come to accept the woman's authority, though. It wasn't just her title, either. It really was her. She was already beginning to understand how this woman had been given such a mantle of leadership despite being no older than Willow herself. Of course, it was more than a little unfair that no one had ever told her that the Aes Sedai used "Sedai" as an honorific, but somehow, she didn't think she'd score any points with this woman by talking back.

The woman smiled, and a gentle breeze ruffled the verdant hem of her dress. "It's all right," she said. "No harm, this time. Now, I have another task for you. The Aiel are the caretakers of a great store of _ter'angreal_ which belong to the White Tower. They have lain safe in Rhuidean for thousands of years, but the Last Battle is approaching, and we need every weapon to hand that can be had. It might make more sense to have sisters simply Travel to Rhuidean to pick up the artifacts, but there are—complications—in the relationship between the Aiel and Aes Sedai, and it is unfortunately equally likely that some sisters would get somewhat—possessive—of anything of particular interest they might find."

"Wait ... um ... _ter'angreal_?"

"You mean all those whatzits in the square?" Faith asked, her eyes wide.

Willow's eyes widened.

The Amyrlin laughed. "I only ask that, since you are coming, you bring what you can. Also, if you arrive before the siege ends, do not report this to Tiana Sedai or Sharina. The _ter'angreal_ should go to Siuan Sanche. You can trust her." Sadness tinged her eyes. "Or at least I can."

"So, what do you want me to bring?"

The woman smiled. Her smile was warm, but nevertheless commanding. "As much as you can as fast as you can." She thought for a moment. "But in particular, anything connected to _Tel'aran'rhiod_. Anything that appears in the central square of Rhuidean in the dreamworld should come, if you can carry it."

"That's more than we'll be able to carry right there," Faith noted. Willow breathed a sigh of relief. Faith and Buffy had already been to the Rhuidean central square in the dreamworld; she wouldn't have to go herself, and expose herself to the full force of _Avendesora_.

The woman nodded. "Unless you find wagons or another means of bringing yourselves here."

"We'll get it done, Mother," Willow assured her. Maybe they could buy or lease one of Maglor Egan's wagons and just stuff it.

"Very good, child," the woman responded. "Now. A little token of my own faith in you ... and to make it more likely that you reach me safe and sound." She lifted her head back an inch, and her eyes grew distant. An image appeared in the air in front of her—one that Willow actually recognized, as did Buffy. It was the jade bracelet that Buffy's shadow had donned to corporealize in the heart of Rhuidean. "I remember seeing this myself in the dream, not so long ago. It's probably the strongest dream _ter'angreal_ that Moiraine Sedai did not take with her in the first caravan to leave Rhuidean, more than a year ago now."

Willow tried to keep her eyes from flashing, and prayed she was doing a better job of it than Buffy. "I know about it, Mother."

"Good. Consider it yours on loan from the Tower, but also consider yourself forbidden to use it to enter the dream save in absolute emergency. Walking the dream untrained is a sure path to an early grave."

Buffy and Faith gave each other morose looks.

"Now for your guardians," the woman said. She turned to them. "Bair tells me you managed to defeat seven armed _algai'd'siswai_ barehanded, and acquitted yourself the match of any Aiel against the Dark One's miasma."

"Um, huh?" Buffy asked.

"We kicked ass," Faith translated.

"Oh. That."

The woman shot Faith a level look, but this time, Faith had recovered enough presence of mind to simply grin and shrug.

"Bair also tells me that in your world, you fight Shadowspawn every day. That you came here prepared to face an army of them."

"I'm always prepared to face an army of them," Buffy countered. "That's the thing. When there are armies of them out there, you're either prepared to face them or you're not."

That actually elicited a fierce grin in reply, and a surprising expression of approval from both Amys and Bair, who had maintained carefully neutral silence throughout the whole encounter, save for when Amys vouched for Willow's ability to channel.

"Well spoken, child," the Amyrlin said. "Tell me, do you use the sword at all, or are all your battles barehanded?"

"Swords ..." Buffy began, and her expression went suddenly distant. Willow's hand went to her mouth; she knew what Buffy had to be thinking. Only one memory involving a sword could bring that look to her face. The expression vanished a moment later, however. "Swords get the job done," she said.

"Then I shall entrust these to your care, for the time being," the woman replied, and another image appeared in the air in front of her. This time, the image was of two identical swords, long enough that they would nearly come to chest height on Buffy. Even in the soft, misty ambient light of _Tel'aran'rhiod_, the edges gleamed brightly, enough so that at just the right angle, it was even difficult to look at them. Etched into the blade just above the narrow crossguard was the sinuous, stylish outline of a heron standing on one leg.

Buffy took one of the blades and held it up, blade angled downward, and made a few exploratory swings in the air with it. She seemed to approve of it.

Faith was less noncommittal. She took it, spun it around twice forwards and twice back in each hand before relaxing into an effortless, relaxed stance, just casual enough to convince an idiot that her guard was down and just forward enough that she could bring the blade up even if her opponent was a lot faster than he looked. "Wow ... sweet!" she breathed. She even offered the Amyrlin a little bow. "Mother." The most surprising thing, at least to Willow, was that the younger Slayer only sounded partially unserious adding the honorific.

"You'll find them in the waking world in a small rack near the westernmost edge of the central plaza," Egwene noted. "These are Power-wrought blades. They will never dull or chip, and will cut stone more easily than most blades cut wood. May you each prove worthy of the other."

"Thank you," Buffy said, letting out a breath as she did so, as though not entirely believing she was saying it. "Mother," she added, though it still sounded like a rote recitation than a true mark of respect. "It will be good to have a little more than our fists to defend ourselves."

The Amyrlin smiled. "I would send a sister to Travel to bring you all to Tar Valon as easily as crossing a threshold, but they tell me the Power doesn't touch you," she noted. "And I can spare no one to join you for an escort all the way across the Waste. That means the two of you alone will be guarding perhaps the most unique novice to don the white in the Tower's memory, and the Tower's memory is long. I trust you with the swords because I trust you to bring her safely to the White Tower."

"That," Buffy replied forcefully, "I can promise you, Mother."

The woman smiled. "And you might hear me called Egwene al'Vere, or Egwene Sedai, from time to time."

Willow smiled, but decided not to push things. "I'll keep that in mind, Mother."

Her smile broadened, and Willow wonder if she might not have dodged a trap just as the conversation was drawing to a close. "As much as you can, as fast as you can. I'll see you in Tar Valon." She turned, an unseen wind just barely touched the ends of her hair, and between one eyeblink and the next, she was gone.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Sorry about the long gap in between updates! Trying to keep all the information on the Wheelverse straight is something of a challenge, and finding writing time isn't as easy as it was when I was in school, either. Hope you enjoyed this chappie, and as always, I'll try to do better.

Thank you all so much for both your patience and your feedback! You make this all worthwhile. ('Cause Light knows I ain't getting paid for this.)

**Coming Soon:** Chapter 7, "To Tar Valon." Willow, Faith, and Buffy have a lot of desert to cross to get to the Dragonwall, to say nothing of Tar Valon. Could be a little bit boring. A welcome chance to sit back, take a breath, relax, reflect, and plan.

Hah! Not!


	7. To Tar Valon

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or there would be a little bit more True Religion in my closet. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 7:**

** TO TAR VALON**

The low thrumming of the helicopter's engine grew and grew until it thundered from the sides of the crater. Dawn could just make out the landing lights in the distance against the night sky as the craft approached and touched down at the edge of the cliff; there was no ground smooth enough for a landing in the crater itself. She knew who was on board, but it was still crazy to think that the guy owned a helicopter now. The last time she had visited the guy, he had a one-bedroom basement studio apartment in a rougher quarter of Sunnydale. Actually, she reflected, somewhat morosely, she had never actually visited him there, but she remembered it and he remembered it, so it wasn't worth arguing at this point.

Twenty minutes later, Angel and Wesley Wyndham-Price appeared on the edge of the small hollow that served as Slayer Central at the moment. With him was a quiet, bookish slip of a girl whom Dawn didn't recognize.

"Hey," she greeted him awkwardly.

"Hey yourself," he replied. Well, at least he didn't seem to feel any awkwardness at the situation.

"Extraordinary," Wesley breathed, stopping to take in the sight of the massive stone column and the white stone dais around it.

"Yes, yes, I think I told you that," Giles noted.

"Anyway!" Angel announced to the assembled Slayers, none of whom had ever met him, or any of the Wolfram & Hart staff, for that matter, "ladies and ... nerds ... my name's Angel, you've probably heard of me, and I'll be your host for this ... well, however long it takes to get Buffy and the others back. This is Wesley Wyndham-Price, another former Watcher, in case it wasn't completely obvious—and this is Fred Burkle, our resident expert on interdimensional physics and parallel universes. Figured it couldn't hurt to bring her out."

The girl simply waved shyly. Dawn gave the girl another look. This girl was some kind of scientist? Then again, maybe imagining her in a lab coat or a library wasn't so hard, at that.

"I've got a cargo copter on the way with food and temporary shelters and some more mumbo-jumbo that Wes says might help. The roads are still going to be out of commission for a while—that quake was a doozy. Questions?"

Silence answered him.

"All right, well, I'll leave these three in your care. I'll be back when you guys get some better shelters built, but it looks like some of you sleep with the sky for a roof and the rest have tents that let in no small amount of sunlight, which I have certain problems with." He shrugged. "We'll be in touch. And we will never ... I repeat, never ... give up at this." There were nods all around, but most of those listening just shrugged.

"Oh forget it, I suck at speeches," he said, and set himself down on the ground, Wes and Fred on either side. Giles found himself a handy rock to use as a stool. Dawn, Andrew, and Xander just found themselves open patches on the ground. "Anything worth knowing?"

Dawn shook her head. "I'm sorry. I know I did something, but I swear, I have no idea what."

Angel nodded. "Figured as much."

They talked a while after that—Wes peppered her with many more questions than Angel himself did—before Angel had to leave to get back to his chopper to make it back to L.A. by morning.

Fred said nothing. She had brought a laptop and a number of thick notebooks, and had one of the notebooks out already, spread across her lap on a small writing board. She was either doing extremely advanced physics in her head or just doodling; it was hard to tell which. She never seemed to meet Dawn's gaze directly, though she did apparently take notes whenever Dawn gave an answer to one of Wes' questions that she hadn't already answered; the man had a tendency to ask the same question five different ways, as if she couldn't understand what he was getting at the first time. If she had any ideas, however, she wasn't sharing them, and when Dawn stole a glance at the girl's notebook when Fred shifted in her seat, it seemed nothing but gibberish. She seemed as much in another world as Buffy and Faith and Willow probably were at this point.

* * *

The rim of the distant eastern wall of the valley of Rhuidean was just beginning to don the rosy crown of dawn when Faith nudged Buffy awake. The elder Slayer's eyes opened quickly, though she gave no impression of being startled. Buffy seemed to have long ago given up the time-honored tradition of stretching and yawning and wishing one didn't have to get out of bed. At least, she did when she was in one of her "on a mission" moods, and from the looks of things, she was in one now that might not wear off until they were back in their own world.

"Hey," Buffy said as she rose. "I miss anything?"

Faith shrugged and nodded in Willow's direction. Buffy turned to look at the redheaded wiccan, curled up in a simple woolen bedroll near the back wall of the tent. Willow had never mentioned anything about the mushroom ring that had blossomed around her the previous night. That one had been picked and discarded by the Aiel—no one knew if the things had been safe to eat—but another had replaced it this morning. This made two nights in a row now. Buffy shook her head. Faith had become better at reading her sister Slayer's thoughts over the years, but Buffy's gaze now was unreadable. Faith guessed that she was thinking thoughts not entirely unlike Faith's own: this was new, and somewhat unsettling, but on the flip side, Willow had never looked healthier in her life. In fact, the air in the tent where she slept seemed somehow more wholesome and alive than Faith had ever breathed on Earth. Of course, given that Faith had lived mostly in Boston, Los Angeles, and Sunnydale her entire life, that wasn't saying much, but the morning desert breeze that rustled softly through the tent gathered scents of pine and moss and flowers, like the deep woods after a late spring rain, as it swirled around the sleeping Wiccan. That was nothing a desert like this would carry on its own. Willow's breathing was deep and steady, and her skin absolutely glowed. In fact, if Faith let her mind wander and unfocused her eyes in just the right way, she was sure she could almost make that a literal statement; distant, half-hidden flashes of light, dominated by verdant green and autumn gold interspersed with a smorgasbord of other brillaint natural hues, danced deep beneath Willow's skin like a thousand tiny gemstones resting lightly on the bed of a deep stream, stirred faintly by the current.

"She's never looked this good," Buffy noted. "Kinda worries me."

Faith nodded sagely. "She's definitely too healthy. That can't be healthy."

Buffy shot her a withering glare and began pulling her clothes on.

Alsera and Nandrys were waiting at the edge of the ruined city to escort them to the great stone plaza in the center of the ancient ruin.

"How did all of those things get here, anyway?" Buffy asked as they walked.

"Aiel brought them," Nandrys answered simply. "Thousands of years ago. The _ter'angreal_ came first, the city second."

Abruptly, they came to the end of the last row of palaces, and Faith beheld the central plaza of Rhuidean for the first time. Her eyes bulged. Buffy's question suddenly took on a new meaning, just given the sheer _size_ of the trove that littered the square. "'As much as you can as fast as you can?'" she asked incredulously. "We'd need a container ship to lug all this!"

Alsera chuckled. "Egwene al'Vere thus did not ask you to bring all of it. Or even much of it." She sighed. "She plays with forces she does not know trying to teach the Aes Sedai to walk the dream," she continued. "Or, rather, forces she knows well, but I fear her students may not wish to learn as well as they should before toying with them themselves. But I ramble. Egwene al'Vere has asked that you take some of the dream _ter'angreal_, and she now leads the Aes Sedai. The debt is hers to collect."

Nandrys nodded towards the western edge of the plaza. "The blades of which Egwene al'Vere spoke are there," she said. Her voice was surprisingly flat. "You can fetch them yourselves. No Aiel will touch a sword."

Faith turned to give the younger Wise One an incredulous look, which only became more so once Faith saw that the woman was absolutely serious. _No Aiel will touch a sword?_ These people lived and breathed battle. They knew their spears and their bows well enough, at any rate. She was sure there was a story there, but she decided not to press the issue at the moment. Nandrys' voice left no doubt that she was deadly serious.

Buffy was already striding purposefully towards the edge of the square where Nandrys had gestured. Finding what she was looking for didn't take long. Faith was still several strides away when Buffy turned and gave a quick grin. "Here, catch," she said, and lofted a long, slightly curved blade in a hard black scabbard towards her. Faith caught it easily.

"Wow," was all she could think to say before she even drew the blade. The sheath was polished and hardened wood—teak might have been close, but it had been hardened by some craft or magic to be as firm and mirror-bright as steel. The hilt of the blade itself was the same color, but less reflective, wrapped in polished black cloth that had somehow survived all the turning of the years here in the desert untouched. Either that or someone had been coming here to clean it several times a year for millennia. Not likely. She pulled the blade just far enough clear of the scabbard to see the mystically forged blade in the flesh for the first time. It caught the dim light so effortlessly that it gave the impression of glowing from within, of giving off more light than could possibly have been there to reflect, though in truth it was just a perfect mirror finish. The blade itself was sharp enough that, even being careful, Faith pricked her thumb when she drew it across the blade just below the crossguard, by the stylized insignia of the wading heron etched into the steel.

"Don't get too cocky," Buffy noted. "Remember, they're not ours."

Faith grinned. "Yeah, but I'm holding it. Good enough for now. And don't try to play the stuffy card with me. I haven't had anything this cool since you let me play with the Scythe." Actually, in Faith's personal opinion, the Scythe was a downright ugly weapon, but of course, it definitely did get the job done. So did these heron-mark blades, however, if they worked as advertised—which certainly looked to be the case thus far, though she wasn't about to try them out on any stone walls here with the Wise Ones in plain view. "Come on, B. They're just like us. Able to kill everything in sight and look damn sexy doing it."

Buffy burst out with a hearty laugh before she could stop herself, and Faith nodded in satisfaction. Nice to know that her sister in arms still remembered how to do that.

They returned to Alsera and Nandrys, who had gathered a small pile of apparently mismatched trinkets next to them. Faith's eyes narrowed. She recognized one of those trinkets. It was the jade bracelet that Egwene had shown them in the dream the previous night.

"This is nowhere near all the _ter'angreal_ that appear in the dream," Nandrys explained. "And none of us can offer much guidance as to which of them might actually allow one to dreamwalk. Among the Aiel, one is either a dreamwalker or one is not."

Faith nodded, accepting that wordlessly. It certainly didn't take any magical doohickeys for her or Buffy to end up in the dreamworld, at any rate. Heck, she might be in the market for one that could keep her _out_ of the dream.

A sudden growth in the light announced the rising of the disk of the sun over the eastern valley wall, though it was hidden from view behind the palaces on that edge of the square. Buffy nodded back toward the tents. "Will'll probably be up by the time we get back," she said. "She ought to have a look at all this before we decide what comes."

"You go get her," Faith said. "I want to have a look around—if that's OK?" she turned the last question towards Alsera and Nandrys.

Nandrys looked at Alsera. The older Wise One let out a heavy breath, somewhat resigned, and shrugged. "Egwene has named you her retainers," she noted. "Be careful, though. She nodded towards a forest of glass columns that surrounded the great tree. "Do not wander in among the columns. We reserve that trial for those who seek to become Wise Ones and Clan Chiefs themselves. Many never return."

"Noted," Faith said.

"What are you doing?" Buffy asked.

Faith shrugged. "Feel like a little peace and quiet, I guess."

Buffy's shoulders bristled, but she controlled herself a moment later. "Fine, whatever. I'll see if I can convince Maglor Egan to give us some wagon space, too. Might let us carry a bit more of this stuff. Hey, you never know. Some of it might even be useful."

Buffy, Alsera, and Nandrys turned and left for the tent city. Nandrys turned a questioning eye over her shoulder as they reached the edge of the square, but a moment later turned and followed the other two women. Faith was alone in the square. She grinned, hefting the sword in her hands. Buffy had to have known that she wasn't actually interested in cataloguing ancient artifacts; that was Willow's department. Giles', actually, if all were the way it should be.

She set out at a slow jog away from the square as soon as Buffy and the Wise Ones were out of sight. As soon as her muscles warmed to the activity, she began to throw in a couple of quick sprints. _Very_ quick sprints.

_No way,_ Faith thought to herself. Neither Buffy nor Faith had spoken of it since arriving in this world, but their apparent imperviousness to whatever passed for magic here wasn't the only thing different about them since coming here. She had felt it in the fight with the shadows two nights past, and even before that, in the fight with the Aiel when they had first arrived here. _I was never this fast on Earth_. She wished she had gotten a chance to see Buffy fighting her own shadow.

She dashed down a narrow alley and vaulted up onto the nearest roof—three stories high. She reached it by springing twice her own height and pushing off with one foot against the right wall, then the same at again that height on the left wall, before seizing the edge of the roof with one hand—at an off angle, at that—and twisting her entire body in a circle using just that hand to vault onto the roof. It was not a roof, but a balcony in an even larger structure, twice as high as the balcony itself.

She coiled her legs and sprung with all her might.

She almost made it clear to the palace roof in one go. As it was, she cleared more than two stories before she landed on the wall. Even then, it seemed like gravity took a heartbeat longer than it should to catch up with her.

As she started to slide down the wall—it never even occurred to her to worry that she was two and a half stories above a stone surface—she tore the heron-mark blade free of its scabbard and drove it into the wall. There was a metallic shriek, but the blade struck right into the stone, carving out a gash almost as deep as one of Faith's hands, slowing her descent and giving her leverage to swing in one of the fifth floor windows.

_Not a chance,_ she breathed. She wasn't even breathing hard. _I did not just do that. Except that I did, and I'm not even breathing hard. Willow isn't the only one way healthier than she should be. Me and Buffy are, too. Just doesn't show as much on us because we were already just that gorgeous._ She grinned and took a running leap out of the front window—not the one that had been against the alley, but the one that overlooked the much wider main boulevard—and cleared it into the top floor window of the next palatial building, a lower, wider, longer structure, somewhat less ornate than the ones around it.

The sun was already past its zenith when she returned to the Aiel tents.

Buffy and Willow were not at their tent, but it wasn't too hard to find them. They were at Maglor Egan's wagons. What surprised her much more was the way the attitudes of the Aiel toward her seemed to have changed suddenly—and not for the better. Some cast frowns in her direction, and one even turned and walked away when she approached him to ask for directions. Even Melainda, whom she had fought beside only two nights' past, and fought well, gave her a cold look when she asked for directions, and her answer was short and clipped.

"What's up?" she asked. "Something wrong?"

Melainda let out a terse breath. "I have seen you fight, outlander. You shouldn't need to carry that, gift of Egwene al'Vere or not."

Faith's eyes widened and dropped to her waist. Her _sword_? This was seriously about her _sword_? Nandrys' words from earlier floated up in her consciousness, and suddenly took on a whole new layer of seriousness. Despite her better judgment against leaving her weapons just lying around for anyone to take, she returned to her tent and left her sword on the sleeping pallet the Aiel had provided. On an instinct, she checked Buffy's, and found her sister Slayer's blade lying beneath Buffy's own pallet. Apparently these people were actually serious about this. That might just have been the strangest thing she had encountered yet. Not that these people weren't fantastically deadly with their spears and bows, and even their bare hands, but that didn't explain why they felt the way they did about swords. It wasn't just that they preferred spears. They held swords in downright _contempt_. For such a martial people, that made, as Oz would have said, "the kind of sense that's not."

When she arrived at Egan's wagons, she found that one, vaguely reminiscent of a Conestoga wagon with a high, curved canvas top over a wooden frame, had been pulled free of the circle. Buffy and Egan's people were unloading the wares it contained and loading them into the other five. Willow was standing off to one side, looking somewhat pensive.

"We got us a wagon?" Faith asked as she approached.

Willow nodded. "We got us a wagon."

"And ... you're looking like this is a bad thing."

She sighed and shook her head as if trying to clear cobwebs. "Not really. Just ... well, we didn't have anything else, but I've never had to use magic for money before. Or I guess for barter, but it feels the same."

Faith understood. Willow has always been a little bit—antsy—about using her magic for personal gain, though she was nothing like those three crazy sisters up San Francisco way she kept hearing about, who apparently made it some kind of religious point or something. Nevertheless, the fact was that if Willow had ever been even of the slightest mercenary bent, she could have retired in comfort even by Southern California standards before she was thirty. "Desperate times," Faith shrugged, trying to think of what to say to comfort someone who was—well, uncomfortable doing something Faith would have been perfectly fine with. "What'd you give 'em?"

"Small wine cask full of the potion I used to treat his guy yesterday."

Faith thought about that for a moment, then shrugged. "Sounds to me like you did a good thing. Egan's a decent guy and his people are just trying to earn a living. If they die less than they might otherwise out here, I think I can live with it."

Willow gave a small, shallow laugh. "Not quite so simple."

"I know," Faith said, and on an instinct, put an arm around Willow's shoulder, despite the redhead having an inch on her. "But that's as complicated as I get."

Willow actually did laugh at that, and returned the hug. "What would I do without you?"

"No idea," Faith admitted sagely. "So it's a good thing I'm here." She looked back to see Maglor Egan's people unhitching the horses pulling the wagon Willow had just bought. "Hey, wait," she asked. "Are they supposed to be doing that?"

Willow turned a knowing grin on her. "Now _that_," she said, "you don't need to worry about."

"I sure hope you're not expecting Buffy and me to pull this thing. The whole ponygirl thing is _definitely_ not my scene."

"Mm, and here I'd gotten my hopes up," Willow smirked. "Tempting, but no. Just worry about getting it loaded."

Faith and Buffy did just that, and it took the rest of the day.

"Where exactly are _we_ planning on going?" Faith asked at one point, as the last of the empty floor space in the bed of the wagon vanished and they began to stack trinkets on top of more trinkets.

"Just stack softer stuff on top," Willow said. "And there's room up front for two."

"I call shotgun!" Faith called from the back of the wagon.

"More like longbow here," Buffy answered. "And we don't even have one of those."

"Sure about that?" Faith asked. Buffy and Willow turned as she hefted a red-enameled longbow set with silver runes in a flowing script.

"Nice," Buffy said. "Arrows?"

"Um ... I'll get back to you on that." She lay the longbow back in the wagon and hopped down from the rear step. "Hey Red, you sure you don't want to come with us? We're just picking stuff up that looks ... well, just whatever. I've gotten everything I can remember from the dream, but your memory's better than mine."

"Um, I was kinda never there in the dream." Faith grimaced. That was right. Faith had gone with Buffy to the central square after the Wise Ones and Egwene had vanished the previous night; Willow had conspicuously begged out.

"And I think this is about as far as I get. I shouldn't have even been down there once," Willow added, nodding at the tree in the distance.

"That bad, huh?"

Willow shook her head. "That good," she said faintly.

In another couple of trips, the wagon was as full as they were going to get it and still have any room for whoever happened to be riding in the back at the time, plus the tent and bedrolls, which the Aiel had allowed the three of them to keep. Buffy had run out of items she remembered from the dream as well, so at this point, they were just packing whatever caught their eye. There weren't many weapons left; apparently Egwene had taken the bulk of those with her when she had been here herself, with a much larger wagon train. There were still a small handful, mostly hidden where someone walking by wouldn't spot them easily. There were many larger items, too, but the largest thing either Slayer had been able—or inclined—to carry back to the wagons on her own was a flat iron circle about a meter in diameter, bisected by a sinuous curve, half stained white, the other half black. Faith had no idea how some of the largest items got here; they'd need a flatbed trailer to move some of them.

"So," Faith said, popping open a waterskin and taking a long draught, "bedtime?"

Willow shook her head. "Go time."

"What? Now?"

Buffy nodded. "I'll go get the tent. Come on," she gestured to Faith.

Faith hesitated. "You kidding? We've been sweating our asses off all day here."

"Don't even act like you're tired," Buffy said pointedly.

That was the closest Buffy had come to admitting that she had felt the same thing Faith herself had during her morning—workout was the only word Faith could conjure, though it had hardly even felt like a workout. It was true enough, too. Faith could have played stevedore for a few more hours if she'd needed to, despite the lack of sleep that both she and Buffy were operating under.

"Faith," Willow said softly. "I'm sorry, but I _really_ need to be gone from this place." As if to emphasize the point, she reached up and plucked a dogwood blossom out of her hair just behind her shoulder. There wasn't a dogwood tree within a thousand miles. Possibly not even within a world.

Faith took a breath, then turned to Buffy. "Let's get the tent."

They finished striking the tent in short order, and without talking about it, somehow both found themselves concealing their swords in their bedrolls for the walk back to the wagon. Some of the Aiel still gave them looks, but most seemed to have forgotten what they had seen earlier, or at least put it behind them. They stowed the folded tent and bedrolls in the back of the wagon, making sure they swords were as hidden from view as possible, though still within easy reach if one knew where to look.

Alsera and Caithryn had joined them again when Faith clambered free of the wagon, as had a half dozen of the Maidens, including a few still sporting wounds from the battle with the shadows. They wore them as badges of honor.

"I suppose this is goodbye, as you reckon it, but I'm sure we'll see one another in the dream again," Alsera said.

Faith, remembering the previous night's crash course—emphasis on the "crash"—fought back a grimace, and did her best to accept the remark in the spirit in which Alsera offered it. "Certainly does seem a possibility," she replied dryly.

"You've been good to us," Buffy said. Then, after a moment, "well, except that first part, but we understand."

Melainda stepped forward. "It's a shame you could not stay with us a while longer," she said warmly. "I might have liked to call both of you spear-sister someday. Travel safe. I won't be able to see you in the dream, so I hope you keep yourselves alive until we can see each other in the flesh again."

Faith grinned. "I'm definitely down with that."

"I'm a fan of that plan, too," Buffy said. "If we find our way back here before we find our way home."

"Actually, we need to speak with you about that," Alsera interjected, a note of concern in her voice.

Nandrys, Dainya, and Charyn arrived at this point, each carrying a small bundle wrapped in cloth. Alsera gestured, and two of the white-robed _gai'shain_ came forward, bearing similar bundles. The concerned note vanished from her tone momentarily. "For your valor in battle, and for teaching us a little bit more of this world, and the worlds beyond, than we had ever dreamed of knowing. And because it would sadden us if you died crossing the Waste."

The bundles contained nothing special, but nothing unwelcome, either: extra clothes, dried foodstuffs, some basic tools, a trio of waterskins, and a few maps—one large one and a set of smaller ones. Alsera also gave them weapons: two short horn bows with quivers and arrows, as well as six of the short, broad-bladed spears the Aiel used. Buffy, Faith, and Willow each thanked the Wise Ones as gracefully as they could. Faith wondered if Buffy and Willow had even thought of little essentials like these in their rush to be away. It was going to be a long journey across the Waste. Faith had heard of what Willow had done on the food front the previous evening, but it was nevertheless hard to imagine that she was going to be up for doing that day in and day out for however long it took them to cross the vast emptiness between Rhuidean and the mountains that separated the Waste from the more fertile lands to the west.

"It was the least we can do," she said. "But I also need to give you another warning of our customs. Your arrival here had no precedent, so we have made exceptions, and I do not regret them in the least. However, only Aes Sedai, the Lost Ones, gleemen, and peddlers travel the Waste by our leave. It would be best if you did not return outside the company of one."

Faith arched an eyebrow at that, but the Wise One was deadly serious. She shook her head helplessly. Customs here had more force than most laws in the U.S., apparently. She grinned. "Well, Willow will be an Aes Sedai before long, right?"

Alsera shrugged. "It takes most women years, and some decades, to earn the shawl."

Faith bit back a retort at that that; she had met the woman who was apparently the leader of the Aes Sedai, or at least of one faction of them, and she was barely Faith's age. Then again, the woman had had the most commanding presence Faith had ever seen, even among the Wise Ones and even counting Buffy herself, and she had been told that the woman was a historical exception. Besides, she was starting to have a few doubts about this whole Aes Sedai business, and wasn't about to make an effort to keep the topic alive.

"It may," Willow said simply. "But we'll have to find some way back here eventually," she added. "Or else find another Portal Stone out there somewhere."

"Be that as it may," Alsera said, "our laws must hold from here on. You have safe passage to the Dragonwall, but do not look back to Rhuidean once you are gone from here. This city is our secret, our refuge, and our dream. We do not share it lightly."

Faith couldn't think of anything else to say to that, and besides, it wasn't like they were really likely to be coming back anytime soon. She just didn't like the fact that the few friends she'd made here in the past few days were going to be essentially off-limits. She had no idea what a "spear-sister" was, but she was going to miss Melainda and some of the other Maidens and the other _algai'd'siswai_, the Aiel warriors around whom most of their society seemed organized.

"We won't do anything to offend, if we can avoid it, Alsera of the Salt Flat Nakai," Willow said with a light incline of her head. Alsera breathed a soft laugh at the Aiel form of address. Willow turned back to the Slayers. "Load up," she said. "Let's get moving."

"Um, Willow?" Faith asked.

"Hm?"

Faith just nodded at the front of the wagon. "No horses, remember?"

Willow smiled and walked to the front of the wagon. "Don't worry. I said I promised I wouldn't make you pull."

She kept walking up the gradual slope that led away from Rhuidean another few dozen yards until she came to what she was looking for: a pair of large boulders, almost equal in size and slightly larger than a good-sized motorcycle. Kneeling down in a small space between them, she spread her arms and put her hands on the boulders. Actually, Faith observed after another instant, that wasn't quite right. She put her hands _in_ the boulders, like their surfaces were nothing but water. Glowworms of brown and yellow energy arced out from Willow's body and coursed over the boulders.

And they began to move.

At first, they cracked like old joints, only deeper and louder. Then they began to soften, only for a moment, legs and hooves taking shape and breaking free of the main masses of the boulders, long heads with manes of petrified mosses and lichens sprouting from one end, tails of rocky weeds at the other. Eyes glowed pale white at first, then resolved into quartz crystals of the same color.

"You're kidding," Faith breathed.

"Willow ... what on earth are those?" Buffy asked.

"Exactly."

"What?"

"Earth."

"Not funny."

"Not lying. Earth elementals. Tara and I used to create them to go riding, when Sunnydale was quietish."

"Earth elementals?" Faith gasped. "Don't tell me you brought your twenty-sided dice with you, too."

Faith got the distinct impression that Willow was resisting sticking her tongue out at her. "Right, because vampires and werewolves were just made up for a game, too."

"OK, point, but still."

Willow began leading the horses back to the wagon, the stunned Aiel who had gathered to watch shifting out of the way wordlessly. "And sorry, Xander stole my dice when we were in middle school. He denies it, but I know better. Especially because he was playing with them with Giles and Andrew before the Turokalypse."

"The little punk."

"And if you ever say 'Turokalypse' in my presence again," Buffy added, "I'm going to stuff you in the trunk for the rest of the trip."

Willow grinned lightly as she hitched the rocky horses to the wagon. She nodded at the space beside her, and Faith hopped lightly onto the right side of the wagon tongue. "Hey, I called shotgun," she reminded Buffy. Buffy just shrugged and climbed in the back.

"I doubt I'll ever get used to seeing that," Alsera noted, perfectly nonchalantly, as if such things happened here every day. If she were as stunned as some of the other Aiel watching, she gave no sign. "Perhaps one day, you will return to the dream as well. There seems to always be something more about you than meets the eye."

"I hope you're right," Willow replied wistfully, half to herself.

She and Alsera held each other's gaze for a moment longer. Then the redheaded Wiccan shook herself and turned to Faith. "Ready?"

"Let's do this."

"Ready?" Willow called into the back.

"Whenever you are."

Willow laughed grimly. "I don't think I'll ever be ready for this. But good enough."

She had no reins to flick, but she gave a curt nod forward with her head. The earth elementals lumbered into motion, slowly but smoothly.

They were under way.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thank you all so much for both your patience and your feedback! You make this all worthwhile. ('Cause Light knows I ain't getting paid for this.) I'm glad to have found this much interest in a WoT crossover, given that the tickets to bigtime readership here seem to be HP and SG-1 crossovers.

_Tombadgerlock:_ Actually, sometimes, I wonder if I write Willow as too assertive. She was never much of a Type A personality in the series. Even with Tara, it was Tara who made the first move in "The Gentlemen," and Willow wasn't always the dominant partner. And Willow was somewhat shy when Buffy "volunteered" her to perform the Awakening spell, too. Force of personality and decisiveness have never seemed, at least to me, to define Willow. At the very least, she doesn't respond too poorly to others taking the lead and making decisions for her.

_ellf:_ There will definitely be more to come on that score.

_Joe:_ I don't know if this will go on long enough to have that happen. But it's a thought, isn't it?

_j.:_ I'll try!

_Locathah:_ Well, Egwene _does_ have an extremely powerful personality by this point in the series, enough so that many other extremely stiff-necked and powerful women (and men) have fallen in line with her, and I wanted to emphasize that. However, I don't think your concerns are misplaced, and I think you'll see that in chapters soon to come. However, see my earlier comments about Willow not necessarily being extremely decisive just because she's powerful. Also, Egwene's point about the Tar Valon library did seem like a legitimate trump card to me. The three women are alone in a new world and don't have a lot of friends or options.

_jen:_ I hope to answer some of those thoughts very soon. ;-)

_ok:_ I really don't think I've underpowered either Willow or the Slayers. If anything, I think I've powered up the Slayers, since I modeled some of my fight scenes in previous chapters after _Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children_, which involves, for example, much more powerful gravity-defying abilities than the Slayers have ever been portrayed as having. And Willow never really donned the industrial-strength white hat until the very end of the series, and her one experience with embracing serious power before that ended very badly, so she backed off for a long while.

_impatientuser:_ I haven't ruled any of the above out as yet. Just have to see where things flow.


	8. Must Be Tuesday

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or my credit card bills wouldn't look as depressing as they do. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 8:**

**MUST BE TUESDAY  
**

Dawn was beginning to break above the brown, snowless mountains to the east when Buffy awoke, Faith's hand gently on her shoulder. She had slept curled up in a pile of the softest _ter'angreal_ she could find, wriggling down into them until she had hollowed out a pocket in the back of the wagon that roughly conformed to the shape of her body and then laying her bedroll on top of it. The tent was forgotten. Willow had apparently had them pack it more for show than anything else. The rocky horses Willow had conjured were slower than normal horses, but she was sure they were making better time than they would have had they found a way to buy Maglor Egan's team from him along with the wagon. Willow's horses didn't need to stop to eat, drink, or rest, nor were they idly distracted. For as long as they could hold this pace, Buffy was content to sleep in the wagon bed. She and Faith had planned on taking turns sleeping, anyway. Finding a time for Willow to sleep was going to be the harder problem, but her friend had assured them that, unless something really unexpected came up, like an attack or a canyon or something, the horses would keep on marching day and night.

She had been in the dreamworld again, of course, but at least this time she apparently had manage to emerge unmolested. She had awoken in the dream version of the wagon, quickly slipped through the strange shadowy mesentery of the dreamworld to her long-vanished bedroom in Sunnydale, and slept the night away. Or at least most of it.

"How you feeling?" Faith asked.

Buffy flexed and stretched. "Little sore. Could be a lot worse. Better than stopping."

Faith nodded. "All right. Willow says brunch around noonish. I should be up before then. Give me the usual four. Let her sleep through."

Buffy put a hand on Faith's shoulder. "Wait. Not yet. We need to talk."

Faith looked Buffy in the eye for a long moment, then nodded. "Yeah. We do. Ugh. Let's get it over with."

The two Slayers clambered and crawled over the piles of junk in the wagon to the front. Buffy slipped past Faith and out onto the wagon tongue; Faith just formed herself a seat at the front of the cargo area.

"We alone?" Buffy asked Willow.

"Best I can tell," Willow answered.

"Good enough. Willow, we need to stop and think about this. Or, rather, keep moving, but double up on the 'think about this.'"

"I know what you're going to say, Buffy. I rushed into that." There was no doubt of what "that" was.

"OK, so consider that out of the way. Actually, no, I need to say it. You really, really rushed into that. And you dragged us with you."

"You heard the woman. The only library in this world that might have what we're looking for is in that city. Where else were you planning on going?"

"We could have gone to the city but _not_ have you sign up for Heaven only knows what."

"Then we wouldn't have gotten into the library," Willow observed. "Not without breaking in, and do you really want to try sneaking into a fortress under siege, with hundreds of women on both sides that can do what the Wise Ones could? Oh, and guards. Humans. With weapons. Hard to fight without killing them."

"We could have waited until we _got_ to Tar Valon and maybe learned a little bit more before you committed yourself like that."

Willow shook her head. "I don't know. We'd have been strangers coming in on the siege. And the Wise Ones seemed to trust Egwene."

"Well, at least you've recovered enough to call her _Egwene_ instead of _Egwene Sedai_ or _Mother_," Buffy noted. Willow had picked a heck of a time to revert to her wallflower self, though Buffy admitted that the woman had had one of the strongest presences she'd ever seen. Maybe the strongest.

"You were calling her 'Mother' yourself," Willow replied.

"That was different."

"Hm." She sighed and shrugged lightly. "Look, I don't know, she was just so—I don't know. Strong, I guess. And that dreamworld freaked me out with my clothes and everything changing or downright vanishing. I don't know how you guys do it, but she was really ... strong. And I trusted her. I think I would in person, too."

"I don't know how we do it, either," Buffy answered, "but that's just part of the problem. We don't _know _enough."

"Then I suppose it's good that we're going to someplace that's apparently all about _learning_," Willow grated back, a touch of irritation creeping into her voice. "We got all the answers we were ever going to get from the Wise Ones, and we can't go back there now, anyway. So it's either go to Tar Valon or suddenly decide to go somewhere else. With all the Aes Sedai's stuff, too," she said, nodding pointedly at the collection in the back of the wagon. "I believe the Wise Ones when they said they didn't know where the _Car'a'carn_, their chief of chiefs, is. So unless he magically appears somewhere, Tar Valon is Option A and Option Z. The only question is how we get there. At least this way, we can say we have a reason to go there."

There was a brief silence, then Faith added. "There's more, though, isn't there?"

Willow shrugged. "You heard what Egwene said about me. I could be dead before we get out of here if I don't learn to control this other power they use."

"Do you even know if you_ can_ use it?" Buffy asked.

Willow sighed. "Not a hundred percent, but it does look that way. At least, I was starting to see it when the Wise Ones use it. It's kind of like an aura surrounds them when they're getting ready to do something with it, and I can see—I don't know, strands, flows, ribbons—of the power they're forming into their effects when they do. I couldn't do it at first, but it came on quick. As in, in just the time we were there. And sometimes I almost felt I could feel what they were doing and copy it, but it just kind of slipped past me. Plus after Egwene gave that warning, I kind of backed off. Would hate to burn myself out on the first try. But yeah. I think she was telling the truth about that, too. And none of the Wise Ones said anything different about girls dying if they didn't learn to control it."

"And yet none of them were exactly offering to help you control it, either."

"I don't think signing on as their apprentice would have been any easier than signing with Tar Valon, if they'd even let me."

"Got that right," Faith grumbled sullenly. Buffy gave her a sharp look. _Whose side are you on here?_

"And they probably wouldn't have," Willow continued.

"OK, so Tar Valon, but think about it. We're carrying a wagonload of magic stuff of some kind or another, and at least to any stranger, we look like three girls. She basically painted a target on our backs."

Willow nodded. "I know."

"So maybe start thinking that she's not just looking out for us."

Willow turned a suddenly icy glare on Buffy. "I know, but _we_ can still be looking out for us. And we can't do this alone, anyway. We're going to have to trust someone at some point. I think you trusted the Wise Ones. The Wise Ones trust Egwene. What more do we have to go on?"

"I _understand_ the Wise Ones a little, and the Aiel, I think," Buffy countered. "Doesn't necessarily mean I _trust_ them. And you yourself heard the way she talked. She wasn't being straight up with us. Not even close."

Willow nodded again. "I know that, too. But I still think Tar Valon is our best option, at least until others open up."

"Just be careful, Red," Faith spoke up. "People like that, places like that—I don't think they're going to just let you go if you decide you want out in a couple of weeks. Maybe, but my gut tells me not. Fishermen don't generally let fish out of nets."

Buffy nodded. She'd gotten the same impression. Something about Egwene, the way she talked about commitments and expectations about working one's way up the ladder—which apparently could take decades, which they didn't even have if they wanted them, with some kind of Last Battle imminent in this world, the novice book, the whole _feel_ of it was a lot like Faith had said. Fishermen casting nets, and Willow just swimming in and letting herself be caught.

As if reading her thoughts, Willow let her grin broaden. "Then we'll just have to make sure that we're not the fish we think they are. The joke's on the fisherman if they go for a bass and catch a hammerhead."

Buffy heaved a few long breaths. The Amyrlin—Egwene—had not been completely forthright with them, but she hadn't really been dishonest, either. Had she really been so, she never would have admitted so casually that she was being held a prisoner in her own palace. Or at least the palace she claimed as her own. Likewise, it was almost a certainty that they would never be so well-protected as they were now with the blades Egwene had let them take from the Rhuidean collection. The Aiel would never have let them near those otherwise, and they'd be out here with nothing but those spears and horn-bows, both of which clearly paled in comparison to the heron-marked blades from Rhuidean, forged by this Power of which the Aiel and Egwene had spoken. And Willow was right about them needing to get to Tar Valon, unless this _Car'a'carn_ reappeared from whatever hermitage he had found Likewise, if they decided to go off and do their own thing now, the Aes Sedai would have every reason to hunt them down and find them, and that was almost certainly to go poorly for them, whatever resistance she and Faith had to this Power they wielded. They'd certainly not be likely to gain access to the Tower library, at the very least. Also, at the end of the day, while she might have disapproved of their methods, the Aes Sedai at least appeared to be on the side of the good guys here, though in their own way and on their own terms. They wanted to stop things like people's shadows trying to kill them.

Of course, they were also squaring off against one another right now, and before their own fortress. That did raise some questions as to just _which_ side _which_ Aes Sedai were on, but for better or for worse, Willow had committed them to Egwene's side, at least for the foreseeable future. Buffy was actually OK with that, just based on her meeting with Egwene. There was a certain aura that _winners_ had, regardless of the causes for which they fought or the hardships they faced, that Egwene had projected like a sun. She was almost as confident as Egwene herself had been that, when the smoke cleared, Tar Valon would be in Egwene's hands, for better or for worse. So at the very least, she was fairly confident they had signed onto the winning side, even with its leader in the hands of the enemy.

"I guess we're kind of stuck," she conceded, doing her best to contain her sullenness. "I just don't like the fact that you've really limited our options." She hated having her freedom of choice constrained.

Willow was silent for a moment, then asked, "ever read of Xiang Yu?"

"Um, read?"

Willow shrugged, but grinned. "Chinese general. He ordered his soldiers across a river into enemy territory, then burned the ships they used to cross. The point was that the only way they were going home was forward, so there was no sense in even being able to think about going back. Forced them to focus on winning and not split their attention."

Buffy was silent. It was a good move. She might have done the same in his place. But this was different. Largely because she was the soldier, not the general, in this scenario, she admitted.

"Yeah, but there's a difference," Faith noted.

"Hm?"

"That guy had an army behind him. We've got one in front of us."

Willow grinned. "I kinda like the army I've got behind me, actually."

"Aw, you say the sweetest things."

"But really ... were we going anywhere but Tar Valon?"

Buffy shrugged. "Probably not, but ..."

"No! No buts. No second-guessing."

Buffy fixed a keen eye on Willow. The little redhead always surprised her; you could never tell if you were talking to the wallflower or the warrior. Well, you could, but only after she said something. "All right, Wills, you know we've got your back. We're not just going to send you into that place by yourself. Just insert cliches about biting more than you can chew here."

Willow held her gaze. "I'm going to do whatever I have to to get in that library."

Buffy held Willow's eyes a moment longer than shrugged. "Guess there's not much I can say to that. Just don't fall asleep at the switch."

Willow grinned. "No, I plan on getting in the back before I fall asleep."

Buffy shook her head resignedly. "Yeah, you're looking a bit beat. Get some sleep. Both of you. I can fend off the sand for a while."

Faith wasted no time in taking Buffy up on that, turning and clambering back towards the rear of the wagon. Willow waited just a moment longer, studying Buffy's features for a moment, before following. Buffy wasn't sure if Willow had seen anything there, but Willow's look had been long and searching, and Buffy guessed that she hadn't been able to hide her most obvious thought from the redhead, at least. _This isn't over._

Willow and Faith rustled around for a while in the back; Buffy heard some scattered mutters about who took whose spot and who was less comfortable, before silence. It was impossible to tell if they were both actually asleep from this angle, but at least there was no movement. She folded the Aiel cloak the Wise Ones had given her about her head: it was airy and almost gauzy _algode_, just thick enough to keep out the sun and blowing sand while letting in the warm desert breeze. It was the only shade she'd be getting today until it was her turn to go back in the wagon. There were no trees as far as she could see, and not even any rocks capable of offering shade for miles in any direction. Not that the horses would have stopped at any such spots even had there been any. They seemed to know their way with an implacable purpose. Either that or Willow had just set them on autopilot and pointed them westward. Possibly both.

Buffy woke Faith at as close to ten as she could estimate, then Willow at noon. Faith's stay in the dreamworld had apparently been unremarkable that night, too; she had returned to Angel's empty basement in the Hyperion and slept like a babe. Once Willow was awake, they shared a quick breakfast of a few dried fruits and a few swigs from their waterskins. Willow assured them that water wouldn't be a problem, but somehow none of them could force themselves to be so openly incautious. Even Willow.

The horses plodded onward. Few words passed between them. There was little to say, and the dry heat of the desert during daylight made talking for any length of time uncomfortable anyway. The sun dipped low on the horizon and then vanished, and the temperature began to drop. In the darkening gloom, they saw their first signs of life they had seen in a while: a series of campfires almost to the horizon.

"Do we go?" Faith asked.

Buffy shrugged. "Would probably look suspicious if we don't. Or at least if we're too obvious about trying to go around them."

"Keep your distance, Chewie, but don't _look_ like you're trying to keep your distance," Faith advised sagely. Willow and Buffy shot her a pair of scalding looks, in such perfect unison that she broke out laughing.

The camp was miles away, but the distance closed quickly. As they drew closer, Buffy could see that it was in fact an Aiel camp. There were probably about forty all told, of all ages. She could see one boy who couldn't have been older than six. There was something a little different about them, though. They hid it well, but as the trio drew still closer, Buffy could see something of a haggard look on the faces before her, something she hadn't seen on any of the Rhuidean Aiel.

A tall man with a shock of red-golden hair just beginning to grey at the temples stepped forward to greet them as they approached. A small handful of Aiel fighters accompanied him. If he was at all taken aback by their otherwordly horses, he gave no sign, though some of the others with him did. "Ho," he said.

Buffy half hoped that Willow would keep the horses right on walking, despite the fact that it was clearly a bad idea. Willow apparently agreed with the latter part. The horses stopped, for the first time since they had started moving.

"You're don't look like peddlers," the man mused. "Or Aes Sedai," he added a moment later, though he was less certain of himself in saying that, despite looking at Willow's hand and seeing no ring there.

Willow shook her head. "We bought this wagon from a peddler at Rhuidean. We've been given permission for a one-way trip to the Dragonwall."

The man's eyes narrowed. "By whom, may I ask?"

"Alsera."

The man's posture relaxed. "Of the Salt Flat Nakai, I believe." He sighed. "Hurac, of the Green Salts Shaido," he introduced himself. "I suppose I speak as war-chief among us, though I have no dragons to show."

Willow, Buffy, and Faith looked at each other in puzzlement. Faith shrugged. It would have been useless to hope that they'd have learned of all the Aiel customs in three days. The gist of the man's meaning was plain enough to Buffy, anyway. The man was in charge of the group, but that didn't necessarily meant that he ranked highly among the Green Salts Shaido overall. The rest, they could work out later.

"I'm Willow," Willow introduced herself in turn. "This is Buffy, and this is Faith."

Hurac nodded. "We have no water or shade to share, wetlanders," he said. "But I suppose we can make room at our fires. It would perhaps do us some good," he said. Buffy had no idea what he was talking about. He was offering to do them a favor, though not much of one, but acted like he'd be doing himself a favor by doing so. She shared a look with Willow.

Willow turned, addressing Hurac uncertainly. "We have our own water and shade," she said. "But your fires would be welcome."

Hurac nodded towards a fire at the western edge of the camp. "Set your camp there," he suggested. "On the edge of ours. We break camp for Rhuidean before dawn."

"We'll be up early, too," Willow said. They moved their wagon to the spot Hurac had indicated. They passed more of the camp than they didn't in doing so. What Buffy saw confirmed what she had sensed on their approach. For whatever reason, these Shaido were downright dejected, at least by Aiel standards. There had been a few Shaido at Rhuidean, and they had had the same feel about them, but it had been less pronounced there. The Aiel gave them measuring looks as they passed, but disinterested ones as well. Apathetic, despite the sight that the three of them must have made, with their earthen horses and wagon loaded with magical goods from Rhuidean itself.

Two tents faced the western watchfire, spaced closely together, so there was still a great deal of room on the far side. Willow stationed the wagon as far opposite the Aiel tents as she could, so that the back of the wagon faced the fire and the front, including the horses, was shielded from the firelight and pointed westward, in the direction they would head in the morning. Two Aiel were at the fire, one tending it, the other holding a spit over it, roasting a pair of chickens. Hurac came to join them a moment later. None of the others seemed to care. Buffy caught one or two looks of disdain from other Aiel who passed through her field of vision, and another one or two of idle curiosity, but most of the rest seemed caught up in their own world somehow. Not what she'd expected to find at all.

"Is there ... is there a Wise One here, by any chance?" Willow asked.

Hurac chuckled mirthlessly. "Would that there were. We could use a dose of wisdom."

"We could have used a few a long, long while ago," the Aiel roasting the chickens added somberly. He was shorter than most Aiel, with rusty hair a shade darker than Hurac's and green eyes, probably no older than Faith.

Hurac looked about to put the young man in his place, but then apparently decided it wasn't worth it, and shrugged. "Waking from a dream can be painful," he said. "Especially when it's a nightmare one has brought on oneself."

"Isn't it better to wake up from a nightmare than be stuck in it?" Faith asked.

Hurac gave another chuckle that didn't reach his eyes. "It may be," he said. "It may be. Tell me, wetlanders, do you know if any of the Shaido Wise Ones or sept chiefs have yet returned to Rhuidean?"

Buffy thought for a moment, then remembered. "Caithryn of the ... um ..."

"Moshien Shaido," Hurac finished for her. He leaned back on his hands and looked up at the stars. "Any others?"

Buffy, Willow, and Faith looked at each other and shrugged. Hurac read the gesture well enough.

"Only one," he said. "And not of the Green Salts. And yet more than I half-feared we would find. Perhaps I will sleep a little easier tonight. At the very least, I can know that I'll sleep easier tomorrow."

"You guys been on the road a while?" Faith asked. "Not that there's a road here, exactly, but ..."

Hurac grimaced. "Less than some, but more than distance can make a journey long."

_Very Zen, but very true_, Buffy admitted.

They talked a little while longer before Hurac excused himself to go deal with something else to do with running the camp. Buffy took the excuse to grab Faith and see to setting up their own tent; she hadn't been completely keen on stopping, but since they were stopped, they might as well sleep on the ground instead of amid piles of junk. Willow stayed behind, talking to the other two Shaido at the fire. They seemed to give her a little more respect than Buffy or Faith, though it was hard to say how. Perhaps they just sensed something about her, whatever it had been that had made Hurac do a double-take to ascertain that she really wasn't an Aes Sedai. That didn't necessarily mean they were talking freely, however. There was obviously a difference between those who actually wore the ring and those who merely had the potential. Also, Willow, for all her nature-loving ways, couldn't set up a tent to save her life.

Buffy took first watch, while Faith went to sleep. Whatever else had happened to cripple the Aiel's morale, they at least hadn't given up on the military discipline that seemed part of their culture from the cradle onward. At least six of the forty-odd people in the camp were on watch besides her.

Several hours passed uneventfully. The Shaido on watch occasionally made nods of acknowledgment in her direction, some casual, some oddly grudging for a people to whom she had never done anything, but as a whole said nothing to her. She was only a few minutes from waking Faith when a cloaked figure appeared out of the night from the north, walking slowly but clearly towards her. Her eyes narrowed. There weren't tents that way; the travelers had set their tent at the western tail of the Shaido camp. There was nothing but empty desert to the north. Someone who had gone on patrol, perhaps? There were two other Shaido in sight; none seemed to be taking any notice of the newcomer.

It wasn't until the man got within a mere few strides of Buffy that her Slayer-sense began to tingle. When it did, however, it began to build startlingly rapidly. She narrowed her eyes and began to seriously concentrate on the black-cloaked figure. Her hand was moving towards the hilt of her sword like it had a mind of its own, and her heartbeat quickened a hair. There was something unseen surrounding the new arrival, almost like an invisible fog, if that were possible. Invisible to the naked eye, at least. It began to part when she fixed her gaze on it and began to really make an effort to see what was in front of her, however.

The fog parted like a gauzy veil. Buffy's Slayer-senses blared suddenly in the silence of her mind like a tornado siren.

The creature drew its cloak apart. It wasn't a cloak. Broad, webbed, batlike wings surrounded a figure too thin to be human even were its face less than monstrous. Grotesque red lips framed a mouth with thin, pale fangs spaced far apart on mottled gums. And from those lips issued a low, soft croon.

Buffy's mind reeled. For all the hideousness of the creature, the song was soft. Sweet. Comforting, in an odd way. Her muscles relaxed, though she held her grip on her sword. A small part of her mind screamed that this was not normal. Her Slayer-senses still rang in her head, but they were an alarm sounding in an empty building. She took a slow step forward towards the soft, dreamlike music of the creature's voice. _Come_, it seemed to say, though there were no words in it that she could consciously recognize. _Lay down your cares, your troubles, your fears. You've carried them so long on your small shoulders. Let others take up the blade. You have been made to suffer too long. Let your suffering end._ _Let it ..._

"Buffy!" a frightened voice squeaked nearby. An image floated to the surface of Buffy's mind. A young face with a dimpled smile, and eyes tempered by both hope and pain. A loose wave of red hair. A friend. Willow. Willow shouting a warning. The same warning I'm trying to _shout at myself as this thing's mouth is getting really close to my personal space!_

She forced herself to take a step backward. The creature's song faltered for a fraction of a second, but didn't stop.

A wave of sand plowed into both Buffy and the creature from the side, sending them sprawling.

_That_ stopped the song.

It was like someone had reconnected the power in Buffy's brain. The lights came on again. She surged to her feet again, her sword clearing its scabbard as soon as she had the balance to pull it free without dropping it. Shouts of alarm went up among the Aiel sentries several tents away. _Now they notice!_ She rasped inwardly.

The creature had rolled at an angle away from Buffy, getting the fire between the two of them. There wasn't enough time to circle around the fire before it could get airborne.

So Buffy jumped straight through the fire and threw a flying side kick at the back of its head just as it cleared the ground.

It had already risen too far for her to hit its head, but she connected with the small of its back. It flapped awkwardly for a few more yards, trying to get some more air under it, but flopped ungracefully to the sand moments later. Buffy, somewhat off balance after a long leap into an object on its way up, was thrown sprawling as well. She kept her grip on her weapon, and scrambled back to her feet to finish the job ...

... when out of the corner of her eye, during the scramble to her feet, she was turned sideways just enough to see the second creature that had come from the other side of their own tent, and whose lips were only inches from Willow's. The redheaded Wiccan's eyes were closed, and her breathing shallow and intense, as if waiting for a lover's touch.

White panic stabbed her heart. _"Willow!"_ she screamed, and hurled the katana like a throwing knife. It spun end over end across the fire and fifty feet of open sand. The hilt connected with the creature's throat with a soft squish. Buffy cursed and grabbed a hot stone from the edge of the fire pit, ignoring the pain in her hand as she got ready to launch a follow-up volley; she had hoped to take the thing's head off with that strike, but hadn't had enough time to time the spin of the throw so that it would strike with the blade.

A moment later, however, she realized that she had probably burned her hand for no reason, and dropped the burning stone with a pained hiss as biology reasserted itself. Her strike hadn't taken the thing's head off, but it had caught it in the windpipe. The creature's song choked off. A terrible alertness suddenly returned to Willow's eyes.

A wall of sand erupted between Willow and the creature as it reached for her, and sparks of copper and violet energy erupted along every exposed inch of her skin. Buffy swung back to her own bat-creature, which had managed to get off the ground in the distraction and was flying away from Buffy and the camp as quickly as possible to gain room and altitude, so she never saw what exactly Willow did next, though the sound of it reminded her of a Rice Krispies commercial. The first Aiel sentries had arrived by now as well. The first to arrive had only a pair of those short spears, and he launched it like a javelin at the retreating creature; the man's throw was accurate, and almost had enough range to catch the creature, but it had gotten too much of a head start. The second Aiel, however, was a Shaido Maiden with a horn bow and an arrow already drawn. She stopped just long enough to nock, draw, and let fly. There was enough moonlight to see the arrow make contact with the skin on the underside of the creature's right wing. The creature gave a high-pitched shriek and lost altitude, though it managed to keep enough air under itself to avoid plummeting to the earth.

"Buffy!" Faith's voice rang out. _Nice of you to join us, sister!_ Buffy grated, though she knew that the sleep of the World of Dreams was preternaturally deep, especially for a Slayer. She didn't turn to answer Faith's greeting yet. The creature's drop had brought it within what Buffy thought was the range of her own attack, and she stepped forward, one, two, _wham!_ Her third step turned into a savage kick at the rock, about twice the size of a softball, that until recently had been part of the rim of the Aiel bonfire. The flame-roasted stone flew away from her foot as though flung from a sling. Or a small catapult. She missed—it would have been a miracle to hit at that range, given that she didn't exactly practice kickball with rocks as a hobby—but the rock sailed only a few feet in front of the bat-creature's eyes, and so startled it that it swung awkwardly of course, heading west instead of northwest.

That meant that instead of heading directly away from them, it had given them an angle. Buffy took off, the sand flying up behind her footfalls. Faith came into view from her left, converging on where their best chance to head the thing off would be before it could correct its course again. It was only then that Buffy realized that she didn't have her sword, or anything else to throw, really. She cast a quick look at Faith, and saw that Faith had just grabbed her sword when she'd awoken, too. She had nothing she could use to hit at range. No more handy rocks of the right size asserted themselves, either. Another few strides would get them as close as they were going to get to the creature, but unless they found something to throw, they weren't going to be able to hit it. The thing was beginning to get its flight under control again, had stopped losing altitude, and was even starting to glide a little higher again, even with the wounded wing.

Buffy reached the point that was as close as they were going to get to an intercept point. She cast her eyes around frantically. Faith was only strides behind her. There were three large boulders, none of which she could have hefted that far even if they were no larger than what was showing of them above the sand, a patch of cactus in the shade at the lee of one of those boulders, and Faith. Nothing that could really be thrown. She hissed a curse.

"B, catch!" Faith shouted. Buffy turned and threw her hands up on instinct at seeing the dark, solid object headed her way. Her hands closed around the scabbard of Faith's sword, the blade still sheathed within. Faith was still running at full speed and was quite clearly on a collision course with Buffy despite being only two strides away.

"Faith, what th ..." Buffy shouted furiously, stepping to one side and throwing her free hand up to slow the younger Slayer down.

Faith grabbed that hand as if she known what Buffy would do all along.

"Faith what are you oh _shiiiiiiaaaaaat!_" Buffy screamed as her sister in arms locked her hand around Buffy's wrist, and spun her once, twice—her feet swung free of the ground at this point—and on the third time sent her soaring into the sky, transferring all the forward momentum of her charge and the angular momentum of her swing into one mighty heave.

_I'm gonna kill her!_ Buffy thought as she flew through the crisp desert night. Then she realized that she was coming up on the bat-creature, and coming up fast.

_OK, but while I'm here, I'll kill you, too._

Faith hadn't managed to throw her far enough to actually hit the thing herself. She had, however, gotten her within throwing range. Buffy wrenched the blade free of its scabbard and spun and twisted in the air, throwing herself earthward to give the blade extra momentum skyward.

This time, she didn't strike with only the hilt. She had just enough time to see a patch of moonlit sky open up between the creature's head and chest before, with a soft but heavy _whump_ and a rush of air leaving her lungs, she landed in her sister Slayer's arms, knocking both of them to the turf. Faith's body cushioned most of Buffy's fall, but her head was against Faith's chest, and stars danced across her vision as her skull bounced off Faith's solar plexus.

She rolled over, stiffly. _All right_, she thought, _maybe Faith _didn't_ cushion quite so much of that fall._ Her breath was still coming in dry rasps, and the bitter aridness of the desert air wasn't helping. The stars weren't fading quickly from her vision, either. She could hear Faith gasping for air nearby, too. Buffy guessed that her skull was probably even harder than Faith's chest, and of course, Buffy had at least been the one landing on top. Except Faith deserved it for trying that stunt. Granted, it worked, and now that she thought about it, she wished she'd thought of it herself, but that wasn't the point. The point was _ow, my head_.

The soft swish of cloth announced Willow's approach. None of the Aiel made enough noise when moving that Buffy would have heard them over the labored breathing of herself and Faith at that moment. That she could hear even that much was a testament to her Slayer hearing. And the fact that Willow was running, which tended to get at least a little noisy in a long dress, even a simple one like the Aiel had given her.

"Hey," she greeted them, breathlessly. _Don't expect sympathy from me,_ Buffy thought. You_ didn't just get hammer-thrown_ _at Batman's mutant cousin_.

"'sup, Red," Faith managed hoarsely. Buffy could hear her trying to smile. Didn't sound like it was working too well, but as well as could be expected, probably.

There was the sound of something striking something, a cutting sound of some kind, and Buffy felt something hard being pressed into her hands. Half a _hiari_ gourd. They had kept a few of them, though most had gone to the Aiel and Maglor Egan as goodwill gifts; they wouldn't have lasted the whole journey even if they'd had room to put them all in the wagon. Seemed like as good a time as any to break one out, Buffy admitted.

She sat up. Her vision was clearing at last, and she began digging into the watermelon-like flesh of the gourd with a vengeance, just grabbing out chunks of it with her fingers, and stuffing them in her face, spitting out the seeds. She could hear Faith next to her doing likewise. She turned to see Willow wiping the blade of Buffy's sword with a soft cloth; she had used it to cut the gourd.

"Stay here," Willow said. "I'll go get Faith's sword back." She got up and headed off in the direction of the corpse.

"Hey, hold up!" Buffy said, forcing at least some measure of authority into her voice. "There might have been more than two."

Willow shook her head. "Pretty sure not. And every Aiel older than ten is out looking."

"Careful on the whole witchly scrying thing with these things, Wills," Buffy said. "Didn't tingle my Slayer-senses until they were right on top of me. Either they can cloak themselves, or someone else can do it for them."

"You kidding me?" Faith groaned.

"Not really," Buffy admitted glumly.

"I'll be careful," Willow promised, and headed off.

Buffy waited until Willow was a little ways off, then turned and fixed a frigid glare on Faith. "OK, what the heck was that?"

"There wasn't anything else around to throw."

"That doesn't mean I was available!"

"Think we shoulda just let it go?"

"Not exactly Plan A."

"Then what was Plan A?"

"I don't know. But getting hammer-thrown up to where I get in trouble with air traffic control wasn't it."

"Oh, whatever, B. Not like we had time for a strategy session. Plus you can't tell me that you didn't get at least a little rush out of that."

Buffy lay back and munched some more _hiari_ gourd. She heard Faith shifting nearby, and suddenly felt something close to her, near her ear. She turned to see Faith laying back in the opposite direction, so their heads were right next to each other, though Faith's looked upside down. Faith finished her own mouthful of _hiari_ and grinned at her, apparently seeing all the answer she needed in Buffy's eyes. _I've got to work on my poker face_, Buffy snarled inwardly.

Nevertheless, she admitted, "maybe just a little. Doesn't mean it's healthy."

"Gotta get your kicks where you can, B. Staying healthy ain't a part of this job, case you haven't figured that out yet."

"I've died twice, you know."

"I know. I'm so jealous."

"What?"

"I don't think I'm going to look that gorgeous after I've died even once."

Buffy snorted. "You don't even look this gorgeous and you haven't even died once."

"Hmm. I think you must've knocked your head a little harder than I thought on that landing."

Buffy chuckled. It hurt her ribs. She didn't care.

Soft footsteps approached. Buffy forced herself into a sitting position. The Aiel woman with the horn bow who had shot the creature was approaching, as was Hurac.

"Nice shot," Buffy said to the woman.

"Nice throw," the woman replied.

"Heh. Thanks."

"Oh, but I wasn't talking to you," the woman replied lightly.

Faith, who had yet to sit up, chuckled where she lay. Buffy noted that Faith's breaths had a slight hitch to them, too; her lungs apparently weren't at a hundred percent again yet, either.

"So, can I ask what _was_ that thing? Or was that just another evil bubble?"

Hurac and the Maiden looked at one another. Hurac spoke. "I don't know what exactly an ... evil bubble ... is, but those creatures were Draghkar. Some of Sightblinder's most deadly assassins. And apparently even moreso than I'd thought. I had no idea they could walk right past watchful sentries like that. Usually that's the work of Grey Men."

_Ugh. Terrific. Something else to look forward to, more than likely,_ Buffy groaned inwardly.

Then her brain sped up again, and she bit back a resigned curse. "Assassins, you said," she noted. "So this wasn't random."

The Maiden nodded cheerfully. Buffy considered breaking a few of her teeth, but thought better of it. The woman's skill with the bow had kept the Draghkar in range. Plus Buffy was still too sore to be giving serious thought to sudden unnecessary movements. "And they were definitely not after us, wetlanders," she added. "The two of them came from the widest approaches to your tent they could get to give themselves space and stay out of the firelight as long as possible. One from the northwest, one from the southwest."

"Apparently," Hurac added, reaching down to offer Buffy a hand to her feet, "the Shadowsouled want you dead."

Buffy cringed, though she'd already guessed that before she even asked the question, though she didn't know who the Shadowsouled were. It still grated to hear it.

"Oh, give me a break," Willow groaned. She had just returned with Faith's sword and scabbard. "We just got here!"

Buffy let out a resigned sigh. Or maybe it was a groan. "Someone wants to kill us. Must be Tuesday."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Thanks again to everyone who read & reviewed! You all make this even more worthwhile than it would be doing it just for my own amusement. Glad I can keep at least some of you entertained.

_Tombadgerlock:_ Yeah, I keep meaning to pick up the comics, and I'm sure I will at some point. For the moment, though, all I've got is the TV series (and of course the original movie).

_jen:_ I certainly hope I don't let you down.

_Ben Breck:_ Haven't decided some of those things yet, but I think it's fair to assume that there was no WoT written in the Buffyverse.

_WraithRune:_ There might definitely be some wide looks. Then again, lots of people in Randland are more used to seeing things that Earth people would consider—_abnormal_. Especially in places like Tar Valon and the Borderlands.

_Baalsfire, Joe, Bobbocky, Davide, Jivalour:_ Thanks!

**Coming Soon: **Chapter 9, "Learning Experiences." Buffy and Faith still have to contend with the dangers—and the opportunities—of being stuck in the dreamworld every time they go to sleep. Some dangers are more unexpected than others.


	9. Learning Experiences

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or I'd be driving a Tesla Roadster. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

The release of _Towers of Midnight_ reminded me of this old fic and that I'd done some work to continue it. It's a little dated now, but I'm going to try to add a few more chapters over the next couple of months, just for fun. Of course, since it began during _Knife of Dreams_, much of the material from _The Gathering Storm_ and _Towers of Midnight_ may change, but I will try to work as much of those in as I can, too.

**RATING CHANGE WARNING****:** **As of this chapter, the rating on this fic has been upgraded to "M" for mature themes. Reader discretion is advised.**

* * *

**CHAPTER 9:**

** LEARNING EXPERIENCES**

It was another hour before Buffy got to sleep, and even then, it was only at the combined insistence of both Faith and Willow. Buffy only acceded not because she had learned everything she wanted to know, but because every answer seemed to raise another three questions, and she was losing track of what order she wanted to ask them in or even how to ask them at all.

The Shadowsouled, as the Aiel called them, also known as the Forsaken in the wetlands, were the thirteen lieutenants of Sightblinder, the dark being from beyond space and time sealed in the cursed mountain Shayol Ghul, far to the north. They had been among the strongest Aes Sedai from the Age of Legends, a period something on the order of thirty-four centuries back. They had been sealed with him, thousands of years ago, but they were free now. When exactly they had freed themselves, none could say, but it had been a few years now—years in which the entire world had been rocked by famine, war, preternatural winter, assassinations, social upheaval, and Heaven only knew what else. No one knew how the Draghkar came to be, but they were creatures of the Dark, each and every one, almost always taking orders directly from one of the Shadowsouled themselves. The Draghkar's Kiss screamed "dementor" to Buffy: its favorite method of killing involved mesmerizing the victim with its song, then sucking its soul out through its mouth.

Some of the Shadowsouled had been killed, or so the Aiel believed. At least one had been killed by the _Car'a'carn_; many other Aiel who had followed him into battle that day said so, anyway. How, Hurac had no idea.

The Grey Men that Hurac had mentioned in passing were other assassins for the Shadowsouled; they were used when it was necessary to blend in to get to a target. People's eyes would apparently simply slide over them, unseeing, even as they walked right past security checkpoints, sometimes even alert bodyguards. Even if one could make the effort of will to focus on one, they would seem like just normal, unremarkable people, save perhaps their eyes. Hurac himself had never seen one, but reports of them spread; they were often used for high-profile assassinations, and the _Car'a'carn_ himself had reportedly been attacked by them in the past. Buffy actually breathed somewhat easier at that, though she said nothing to Hurac; if they could make a run at such a high-profile figure, basically as high as high-profile got, and fail, then they could be beaten, even if it would be hard. Their stealthy aura or whatever it was that protected them was not impermeable.

She sometimes had trouble sleeping when she had too much to think about, but she had missed sleeping on _terra firma_, and while her muscles could have forged ahead for many more hours had she driven herself, her mind was heavy and drained from the effort of fighting off the Draghkar's mesmeric song. She shuddered as she wrapped herself in her bedroll, fully aware of what would have happened had Willow not somehow awoken and broken the thing's concentration, and also fully aware that they were probably going to be sleeping in the wagon more often than not for many days, even weeks. She wasn't sure how quickly they were covering the distance across the Waste, but she had seen the maps, and their scale.

Sleep came so quickly that it seemed that the ambient half-light of _Tel'aran'rhiod_ simply appeared between one eyeblink and the next.

She was about to repeat the jump she had made the previous night into her Sunnydale bedroom—indeed, she felt like she had already placed one foot in the all-encompassing, directionless darkness that seemed to hover just out of reach everywhere in this world—when the hair on the back of her neck prickled, and she found that the Scythe was in her hands before she even stopped to think about it. She was tempted to make the jump anyway; there was nothing in the tent with her, and if she could get away before they got their eyes on her, they might find her vanished into thin air. However, she knew it was somehow possible to follow someone's tracks in this world even as they made seemingly impossible movements—the Aiel Wise Ones had tracked her through Rhuidean, albeit with difficulty, when she was moving hundreds of yards at a stride. There was no point in blazing a trail straight to her refuge here.

_It's not paranoia if they're actually after you_, she reminded herself. She cautiously pulled back the tent flap.

There was no one in the Shaido camp but her. The sensation of being watched had faded, too. She made a quick pass around the perimeter of their tent and the few closest to it before slipping back through the folds of her tent and preparing to make the step into her Sunnydale bedroom again.

The sensation returned, and even more forcefully ... not just watchful, now, but _hunting,_ somehow, actively seeking her out. She knew she was the object of whatever awareness it was as surely as she knew that she had a back even without being able to see it. With a hiss, she pulled herself back into the dreamworld of the Aiel camp, smothering whatever errant thoughts of Earth might inadvertently bridge the connection; she had seen all too well the power that stray thoughts had here. It was an effort; her mind was still leaden with the after-effects of the Draghkar's song, but her Slayer battle instincts were coming to her aid, now.

The sensation quieted as soon as she snuffed out her thoughts of Sunnydale.

Buffy's blood froze. _It's on the other side!_ The sensation had blossomed twice only when she had been prepared to step into her own bedroom, back to dream-Earth. There was no one in the camp. There was someone waiting for her at home. Her eyes narrowed. _Oh, no, you don't_, she grated, her hands tightening on the Scythe. _Not in my _house_, you don't!_

Red rage burned in her, and she turned once more to step through the dark nowhere of _Tel'aran'rhiod_ to Sunnydale. Not to her bedroom. Something was waiting for her there. But not far. She fixed a different image in her mind. She had crept through the back door of her house in the dark of night more often than she cared to admit, becoming all too good at doing so quietly in order not to disturb her mother, who always worried about her—and with more justification than most mothers worrying about their daughters staying out late. She reached out again, this time just with her hand, reliving the countless times when she had had to turn the latch just so to mute the click, the way you could lift slightly on the door as you opened it to avoid a creak. Her fingers closed around the doorknob, and when she opened it and stepped through, she was back in the kitchen in her house in Sunnydale.

The feeling returned. Buffy's eyes narrowed as she took a few tentative steps forward into her house. She had had some time to settle her nerves and clear her mind by now. She still felt like she was being watched, sought even, but she realized now that the siren in the back of her mind that warned her of impending threats was quiet.

Then again, the Draghkar had somehow been cloaked in a way that masked it from her Slayer-sense until it was right on top of her, and even then it had taken her looking directly at it and _willing_ herself to see it that had pierced the veil. The Scythe was in her hand as she crept toward the stairs to the second floor—whether the weapon had been there the entire time or only appeared in the instant she thought of it, she wasn't even sure.

The sound of footsteps reached her ears.

That surprised her. The Wise Ones and Gaidal Cain barely walked in the dreamworld at all; they could simply will themselves where they wanted to go, appearing and disappearing at will. The footfalls were also too light to be those of the stocky, armored warrior who had somehow found her sanctum. They certainly sounded human. A Gray Man would make almost no noise, from what she'd heard, and that was assuming that they could somehow reach this dreamworld.

Buffy was halfway up the stairs, and her head was just above floor level on the second floor, when the door to her bedroom, already open a crack, opened the remainder of the way. Buffy almost dropped the Scythe in amazement at the girl who emerged: her form was not entirely substantial, but it was not misty or indistinct, and her clothes showed only the faintest signs of rippling around the edges. She was slender, pale, brunette, and all too familiar. The other girl spotted her a moment later, and her eyes widened in shock and wonder.

"Buffy!"

"Dawn!"

"What are you doing here?" they both asked in unison.

"I fell asleep on the platform and woke up here," Dawn said. "Wherever 'here' is ..." she cut off with a sudden squeak as, between one moment and the next, Buffy's sword was in her hand, thrust forward, the point only an inch from between Dawn's eyes.

"Buffy ... ?"

"Who was the principal at St. Ursula's who always wanted to get me expelled?"

"Buffy?"

"Anything can look like anything in this place," Buffy prodded. "Answer the question. Or get out of my house."

Dawn's breathing steadied momentarily, and her hands fidgeted nervously, though she didn't make any move to back away from the sword. "OK, seriously, does wherever this place is screw with your head, too? Because you never went to St. Ursula. And Snyder was the principal who always wanted to expel you from Sunnydale High. And who succeeded for a little bit, in case you forgot."

Buffy lowered her weapon. "Not _that_ long."

"Oh, so it was more like an out-of-school suspension, then? Way better. Oh, and I almost forgot: What the _hell_, Buffy?"

Buffy winced. She hadn't had any time to come up with a better plan to see if the person she was talking to really was her sister. She also hadn't thought ahead to what it would have looked like if it turned out that Dawn really _was_ Dawn. "Like I said, anything can look like anything here." She focused her mind for a moment, concentrating on her sister, envisioning her in her mind, and suddenly there were _two_ Dawns in the room, identically dressed right down to the stitching on the back pocket of their jeans, one Dawn giving the other a very pointed look.

"Holy ..."

"See what I mean?"

"Kind of. But still."

Dawn's hands were still fidgeting, which Buffy knew as one of Dawn's tics for releasing nervous energy. Her sister's nerves were still frayed. Well, having a sword thrust in your face sometimes had that effect on people. _Did I really just do that?_ Buffy thought with another wince. She reassumed her real form.

"That may be the creepiest thing I've seen in a lifetime of living with a creepy-magnet for a sister."

Buffy ignored that. Or, perhaps, accepted it. The history of her life did not give her a great deal of evidence to argue back against that. There were more important things here anyway. "Dawnie, I'm so sorry-but the fact is you got off lucky, ending up here, with only me and you. This is about the least creepy place in the dreamworld."

"Dreamworld? Seriously?"

"Come on. I've got a lot to fill you in on, and then we need to get you out of here."

* * *

"Do you think this actually does any good?" Dawn asked. She had taken a banana from the fruit basket in the kitchen and was nibbling on it absently. She still wouldn't meet Buffy's eyes after the incident in the bedroom.

"No clue. It might, though. Killing you here kills your real body. Maybe feeding it feeds your real body, too."

"Oh, that's cheery."

"Kinda learning as I go. We've only been in this Aiel world for a few days, but Faith and I have both had to learn really fast. This place is hardcore."

"Yeah, I bet. So you've been in this dream-place every night?"

Buffy nodded. "Honestly, not that it's not great to see you again, but I could go for some more normal sleep. This isn't anything near as good as the real thing."

"Maybe Willow can help with something. Have you asked her?"

Buffy started at that. She hadn't, actually. Of course, there was no reason to think that Willow would be able to do anything about the fact that Buffy and Faith entered the dreamworld involuntarily every night—but then again, their redheaded friend was the most brilliant and potent woman they knew, so there really wasn't any good reason not to have asked. Except for how much else had been going on. "Hadn't really thought about that," she admitted.

"Can't hurt to ask."

Buffy nodded. She should have thought of that herself. Her mind just wasn't at its best day in and day out since she couldn't get a proper night's sleep.

They had filled each other in as best they could on what had happened since Buffy, Faith, and Willow had been whisked away by the Portal Stone that Dawn had unknowingly activated. There were still a lot of holes, but the details were almost irrelevant. Dawn, Giles, Angel, and the Slayers hadn't given up on their end. Buffy, Willow, and Faith were alive on their end. That was all that mattered for the moment. That and figuring out how Dawn had managed to get into _Tel'aran'rhiod_, though the answer to that seemed obvious enough: she had fallen asleep on the white stone platform around the base of the Portal Stone, rather than in her tent some distance from the carved pillar itself. If there was more to it than that, they weren't going to figure it out by talking here.

Buffy had warned Dawn about the strange dream-wandering swordsman, Gaidal Cain, who had either stumbled on the stretch of dreamworld adjacent to Earth, or had followed Buffy there. Dawn hadn't seen anyone else in the Summers home, or in fact anywhere in the dreamworld. She had actually been in the dream reflection of the Sunnydale crater when Buffy began to step through, and had somehow ended up in the Summers home—which was now nothing more than part of a pile of rubble somewhere in that very crater, in the real world—only when Buffy began to step through from the Aiel world. Whether Buffy had somehow called Dawn or Dawn had somehow drawn herself to Buffy, neither of them knew.

"Do you have any idea what time of night it is?" Dawn asked.

"No clue. And it doesn't even really matter." She gestured at the window. The sun was shining, or at least there was light like sunlight filtering down onto the streetscape outside. The light was more diffuse than normal sunlight, though it illuminated the landscape as easily as real sunlight would have, save for washing out most colors. "It was way after midnight when I went to sleep," she said.

"And it's barely after ten on Earth," Dawn noted, getting the point. Time didn't line up neatly between the two worlds, though it didn't appear that a hundred years in one was a day in the other, either. It had been just under a week since the Slayers' and Willow's disappearance in both worlds. "But still ... I want to know when Faith's going to wake you up." She stretched out her hand tentatively. Buffy took it silently, giving her sister the warmest smile she could manage.

"At least now you know we're alive," she said.

Dawn still didn't meet Buffy's eyes, but she smiled. It was a start, perhaps. "Oh, we already all knew that. We just weren't sure you were leaving anything _else_ alive."

Buffy let go of Dawn's hand, threw back her head, and laughed. "Nice to know someone still has confidence in me!" she said, once she regained her voice.

"All three of you," Dawn said. "But seriously, now we can at least have the Wolfram & Hart people start looking into something specific. Maybe someone's heard of Aiel or Rhuidean or something like that. You never know. And now I know I can find you if I sleep right next to that Portal Stone thingy."

"No!" Buffy replied sharply, perhaps more sharply than she intended, but her instincts had taken over again as soon as Dawn mentioned returning to the dreamworld.

Dawn's eyes widened, and she flinched back as if struck. "What?"

"Don't come back here, Dawn, even if you can—it's not safe. Did you completely miss everything I just told you?"

"Well, no, but if I just came here when you do ..."

"You didn't start here, remember? And time flows differently in our worlds? What if you fall asleep next to the Stone and have a nightmare? It could kill you, Dawn! I saw the bruise I left on Faith's face. If I'd hit her with a sword, she'd never have woken up. And you don't know how to get out of the dreamworld and back into normal sleep any better than I do. _Stay off that platform_."

"I'll be careful."

"You'll _what?_" Buffy snarled at the note of sullen defiance in Dawn's voice.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the room around them vanished, and they were no longer in the quiet little home on Revello Drive. A sudden burst of wind swept their hair out to the side, and brilliant, flickering argent light bathed them from below. Buffy saw Dawn begin to reach up to try to control her hair, and saw the look of horror dawn on her face as she realized that she couldn't, because her hands were bound to her sides by hemp cords. She opened her mouth to scream at Buffy, and her mouth was suddenly filled with a silk handkerchief, with a scarf of the same material wound around her face to hold it in place. She began to stumble and looked down, and her eyes widened in horror as she realized where they were, and whence sprang the radiance beneath them. They stood atop a crane above a construction site, hundreds of feet above the ground; in the air between them flashed and flickered the nascent silver-white portal from where all the dimensions of existence had begun to bleed together when the might of the Key—of Dawn's inner nature—had been poured into the weak point between the worlds. Even as they watched, a huge, horned, winged beast of some alien realm burst through the portal and soared into the moonlit sky.

A muffled scream escaped Dawn's lips and she lost her balance. Between one heartbeat and the next, Buffy was there, holding her sister up by nothing but the knot in the cords binding her arms. Had Dawn been watching instead of facing downward, she likely would have seen Buffy's form blur the way Buffy had seen Faith's streaking across the serene landscape of Rhuidean on their first night in the Aiel world.

"This could happen to you anytime you come here," Buffy grated in her sister's ear. "That what you want?"

Dawn shook her head madly, wildly, though whether that was in response to Buffy's question or simply a product of sheer panic was beyond her to say.

The human side of Buffy's mind finally reached Sergeant Summers with the message that she had crossed a line. Suddenly disgusted with herself, Buffy returned the two of them to the Summers kitchen. The ropes and cloths that had bound her sister vanished like they had never existed. Perhaps the Wise Ones would say that they never really had, but Buffy wasn't much for metaphysics. If it could kill you, it existed, as far as she was concerned.

"You could have gotten out of that," she continued, forcing herself to finish the lesson she had begun in anger and frustration. She wished she could take back the last thirty seconds of her life, but this was hardly the first time she'd thought that, and she was no more likely to have her wish come true in this dreamworld than she was in the waking world. "You could have stopped to think and realized that it was only a dream; you could have realized that it was your blood that opened the portal, and you weren't bleeding. But you didn't. And even if you did, you'd have had to force that reality on _me_, with me concentrating on holding it together—and I know for a fact that there are people out there in this dreamworld better at this than me, and not likely to suddenly let you go once they have you. You starting to get it?"

Dawn was still in tears.

"Look at me!" Buffy took Dawn's head in her hands and locked her eyes. "You said you'll be careful. Now listen. The only way you can be careful here is _not coming back_. I'm forcing myself to learn this because it's not my choice to come here. I either figure this stuff out or I die. You're not in that boat, and we should both be thankful for that."

She had either reached Dawn, or Dawn had simply cried herself out. That had been a horrible memory to bring back for Dawn, but Buffy had needed something that she could remember with crystal clarity and fix in her mind even through her anger at her sister's intransigence.

You tended to remember the places you died. Well, assuming you survived.

_That made absolutely no sense_, she thought a moment later. _Except that in my world, it kind of does._

"So what should I do?" Dawn asked. Her voice was still hoarse and weak.

"It sounds like Angel and Giles and the others have the right idea," Buffy replied. "Figuring out how to work the Stones so that they can get through _and_ get back. Maybe you'll figure out something on your end before Willow has a chance to figure things out in Tar Valon. Egwene already said that they don't actually have anyone who knows how to work them, so we're relying on Willow's book skills. Which, you know, I'd never sell short, but that's going to be one ginormous library to work through, and there's no telling that they actually have what we're looking for at all."

"I get it," Dawn said flatly, her voice showing signs of tight control. "But seriously, Buffy—what if you want to get in touch with us? Or us with you? This could be the only way we've got."

Buffy was about to explode again, thinking Dawn was just trying to get her to reconsider, but she controlled herself. Dawn was asking a serious question.

The answer was obvious enough. "The other Slayers," she said. "Let some of them sleep on the platform if you've got news. I'm usually asleep second shift, so graveyard hours. Faith doesn't come here, so coming when she's sleeping won't do any good because none of the Slayers know what the Hyperion basement looks like. But they all camped out at la Casa de Summers. Slayers at least start out stronger here than most other things. At least, from the impression I got from the Wise Ones, they were glad we were raw and untrained, and I know I've been learning fast. If you've got to risk someone, they can make the try ... but seriously, even they should try this only if there's something big going on."

"What if you want to get in touch with us?"

"Might have to live without that."

Dawn simply nodded. Buffy cringed. There was a dullness in her eyes that hadn't been there before, and Dawn wasn't pressing the issue—as if she no longer really cared if Buffy wanted to communicate with Earth or not, even though she'd brought up the issue.

"Dawnie ... I'm really sorry ..."

Dawn fixed her with a flat stare, and Buffy could see written there what she already knew—she'd hurt Dawn. A lot. Buffy didn't lose many staring contests, but she looked away resignedly and conceded defeat without even fighting this one. She still told herself that she had to have done it, that it was better her than the Wise Ones or something much worse, but she wasn't completely sure she believed it herself anymore.

"I know why you did it," Dawn said, softly, almost too soft even for Buffy's ears to hear. "But I still kind of hate you right now."

Buffy's spine stiffened at hearing that word fall from Dawn's lips, especially in such a quiet voice—Dawn, always the emotional one, almost never had that kind of ice in her words. Well, it wasn't like she didn't deserve to be a little hated at the moment.

"Come on," Buffy said. "Let me put you to bed. I'll stay with you until you wake up in the real world. The monsters under the bed may actually be real here, but they'll have to get through me first."

Dawn managed a wan smile. It wasn't much, but Buffy was grasping onto whatever she could. It was a start. Of course, she had thought much the same in the bedroom earlier when Dawn had finally managed a faint smile a few moments after having a sword in her face, too.

Buffy was as good as her word, though her promise put less demand on her time than she anticipated. She talked about anything, everything—just babbled, albeit softly—for a time, then realized Dawn was actually falling asleep, and fell silent, just looking at her sister, wondering how deeply she had cut her. A tear clouded the vision in one of her eyes, and she angrily flicked it away and repressed the others that threatened to follow it, telling herself that she'd need both eyes sharp if anything did happen upon her ephemeral sanctum while Dawn slept here. Dawn's breathing steadied into the natural rhythms of sleep.

A heartbeat later, she faded from view.

Buffy tensed and straightened; had that been supposed to happen? Was that a good thing? She and Faith didn't vanish in the dreamworld when they fell asleep here. They vanished when they woke up-Buffy had knocked Faith awake from within the dream during their first night here. Then again, the Wise Ones seemed to step in and out of the dreamworld without necessarily waking up. They did, didn't they? They had to. Hadn't two of them been trying to teach Faith how to step back into her own natural dreams-into normal sleep? But even if the Wise Ones stepped in and out of the dreamworld with ease, and vanished when they left, did that mean Dawn had gotten out, or did that mean that Dawn might have simply woken up somewhere else in the dreamworld?

"Dawn? Dawn?" she cried into the empty room.

She thought of attempting what she had done to call Faith to her, but that only risked pulling Dawn out of peaceful sleep if she had in fact gone back into her own body. She had tried to call Willow to her side on that night and had failed, but she had learned that that was because Willow had in fact still been awake at that time. She had been able to call Willow into the dreamworld to meet Egwene. She wasn't going to risk pulling Dawn from what might be a natural—and safe—sleep right back into the world she had just warned Dawn to avoid.

On the other hand, if she couldn't bring Dawn back to her, it might still be possible to go to where Dawn was. She knew it was possible. The Wise Ones certainly found their way around easily enough. She just needed to figure out how.

She cleared her mind. "Dawn … where are you … ?"

The world around her spun and stretched, dissipating like an ink stain on water. Replacing it, or perhaps behind it the whole time, was only blackness, punctuated by unnumbered pinpoints of light like distant stars. They were smaller and closer, though, in some way Buffy couldn't quite describe. The ones that were nearest looked like phantasmal glass orbs; she could see things moving in them. She tried to look down at herself, but it was too pitch black for her to see her own body. The endless rush of crystal stars appeared to shine in the darkness, but none of their light reached her. It gave her the sense of being nothing but an incorporeal spirit in the void, an awareness detached from anything resembling eyes and nerves and a brain. She shook her head to clear her mind of those thoughts. The pattern of stars before her did not so much as wobble as she did so. She allowed herself a shiver, and there was no sense of her muscles or limbs moving as it went through her. She shivered again.

She turned her attention to the stars. Some seemed almost close enough to touch. As soon as she focused on one, it appeared to grow nearer in her vision, even though she felt no sense of movement. Perhaps it was moving towards her. Perhaps the very concept of movement was alien in this place. Regardless, in a matter of moments, the star came to rest before her. Not a star at all. It was a perfect globe of light that rippled like water. There were people moving within it. She recognized one. Hurac plodded across a land so bleak and featureless that it made the Aiel Waste seem lush. The sun in the sky above him was vast, low, dark, and red. The color seemed pale in the dreamlit globe at first, washed out as most of _Tel'aran'rhiod_, but the color deepened the longer she looked at it until it was as vivid as a real dream. Suddenly, Hurac's dream was accompanied by sound, as a rush of insectoid hissing and chattering reached Buffy's ears. Suddenly, from either side of Buffy's field of vision, as if coming from behind her, black scorpions scuttled across the featureless landscape on Hurac's trail. They seemed to match his pace perfectly, never getting closer, never allowing him to lengthen his lead. Buffy didn't want to think what might happen if his stride faltered, but it was as perfectly uniform as the land itself as he plunged doggedly onward.

Buffy pulled away. The globe receded until it was no larger than a golf ball, though it remained closer than any others she could see. No, that wasn't true. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of one that was even closer, perhaps the size of a tennis ball. She concentrated on it and it grew again, and this time, it was still several paces away-if paces they could be called-when she recognized whose it was. Even through the ghostly, luminescent membrane of these dream-windows, there was no mistaking that hair-or the library of Sunnydale High, long since destroyed in their world.

Willow stood alone in the middle of the rotunda in the center of the library. She had somehow moved the furniture; long tables made a square that had been wedged open at one corner. Every square inch was covered in books and manuscripts.

She was using magic, too.

Diagrams scribed in fiery golden and silver letters hung in the air, ringed with ancient runes. Traceries of the constellations orbited in the air above her head, changing with her movements, and their presence was no accident; Willow would occasionally stare up at them and then back to a chart on a page, comparing or interpreting, Buffy couldn't tell. The books on the tables changed, too. Buffy watched her reach for a thick red volume bound in leather and come up with the cracked, black volume _Vampyr_ that Giles had first shown her when she hadn't yet known he was a Watcher. Once, she reached for a thin, spiral-bound notebook and picked up a polished stone tablet. If it were as heavy as it looked, Willow shouldn't have been able to lift it; she held it as if it weighed no more than the notebook that had been there originally. She copied some writing on it into the air in letters of dark red flame, intertwining them with a diagram already hanging there in rippling silver moonlight.

Buffy watched, spellbound, as Willow worked in her dream. Did she often dream like this? Unlike Hurac, she seemed to know what she was doing. This dreaming Willow had much more of a purpose than Hurac had-in fact, even more than Willow herself had had when Buffy had called her mind into _Tel'aran'rhiod_ to talk to the Aiel Wise Ones. Willow appeared to finish what she was working on, and turned to a rough ceramic chalice sitting in the middle of one of the tables, atop a stack of books that looked a lot like the _Encyclopedia Britannica. _It was covered with a small square of white cloth; Willow cast this aside and held the chalice up before her, just above her eyes. A vortex swallowed the fiery letters, gold and silver and red swirling down into the chalice as if caught in a whirlpool. When Willow lowered the chalice, it was filled with swirling, liquid light of pure white, dim enough not to blind the eyes but bright enough that Buffy didn't want to look at it overlong. She didn't have to. Willow emptied a small vial of what looked like just water into the chalice, then drank. She swallowed carefully, then gave a long sigh.

The globe went dark and faded.

Buffy stood still-if "standing" meant anything in this place-for a while after that, puzzling over what she had seen and where she had landed herself. It didn't get her anywhere, but it let her clear her head again. It took her a few moments to remember what she had been doing when she stumbled into this tenebrous void in the first place.

_Dawn, _she thought.

The great constellation of dreams shifted slightly, but none drew closer.

_DAWN!_ she projected the thought with all of her might. Another slight shift, like the stars drifting across the night sky. No nearby globes presented themselves the way Hurac's and Willow's had. It occurred to her that Dawn might not be dreaming at all, but she had a sad, sinking feeling that that wasn't the case. After what Buffy had just put her sister through, it was unlikely that Dawn was sleeping soundly at the moment. And Buffy was well aware that somewhere out there in this dreamworld, there was a border with Earth. She had crossed it herself in the more realistic-looking part of this dream every night since coming here. Somewhere out there, Dawn was dreaming, and if she was dreaming, Buffy could find her. She was sure of it. She cast her gaze out amid the stars once again.

Suddenly, she gave a start, or at least, her mind did; the constellations of dreams continued their slow, stately dance. There, in the farthest distance, so faint that even Buffy wouldn't have believed even her own preternatural eyes had her heart not suddenly pulsed with the certainty that she was seeing truly, there was a faint sparkle of green.

_Pure green energy._

The moment it flashed in her vision her heart leapt-as did the entire star-studded void. The sensation of motion was so sudden and so unexpected that she would have tripped, had there been anything to trip over. The dream-lights around the distant green sparkle fanned out into blurred streaks to all sides as Buffy rocketed past them. Onward and onward she soared, seeming to cast herself forever through that abyss. There was a brief period of near-total darkness when she cast herself beyond the boundary of one galaxy of dreams, but the lights of another shone in the dark, and it was from there that the green spark came. Down into the new mass of dreams she plunged, darting past dreams so quickly that they seemed to form a tunnel of striated lights around her. Then, almost before she realized she was doing it, she stopped. The streaks of light resolved into soft, shimmering globes dancing with the images of millions of unwary dreamers, suspended in nothingness. The fleeting sense of motion vanished. And hovering in the near distance before her was one lonely sphere, closer than any of the others, was a sphere, argent like all the others at its core, but limned with pulsing emerald radiance that cast flares and streamers of light into the void.

Dawn. There was no one else it could be. Thinking on how many millions of dreams she had to have passed to get here, there was no one else she could possibly have sensed at that distance.

She breathed a silent sigh of relief. Dawn was safe in her own dreams again-probably not pleasant ones, particularly after what Buffy had just put her through, but ones that wouldn't leave cuts and bruises, or worse. She turned to go.

The flaring green orb drew nearer.

Buffy's eyes widened. She was definitely not trying to move towards it. _It_ was moving towards _her._

She surged backward through the dream-spangled void in the general direction from which she had come. The points of dreamlight stretched into filaments again around her as she retreated.

The green spark was even nearer to her when she stopped moving than it had been when she started.

Startled, she burst away through the void again, this time in a random direction. Again the green light was nearer when she stopped than when she started, despite the endless rush of other dreams that she had flown past in her mad, bodiless dash to get away. The green orb was almost near enough that if she reached out with one hand-or whatever passed for a hand in this place-she could touch it. Panic welled up in her awareness as she surged away one more time. The orbs around her seemed to stretch to filaments once more, then spread to ribbons just before the world flashed green.

_Thwack!_

A scream burst from Buffy's lips as the sting of the lash coursed down her back again. She could feel heat on her naked back and chest, but couldn't see a thing; a thick, soft blindfold covered her eyes, darkening her world to midnight and more.

_Thwack!_

Buffy had been beaten before; in some remote corner of her mind, the rational corner that retreats and hides in dreams, she knew that she had been hit harder than this before and endured it without so much as a gasp, but this _hurt_, somehow, more than the weight and sharpness of the blows should have allowed it to hurt. She struggled, but whatever held her hands above her head was as unyielding as steel, and a high, thick collar of leather or hide around her neck prevented her from twisting her head from side to side or up and down.

_Thwack!_

She tried to speak, to rage, to plead, to demand answers, but her voice refused her commands. Instead, another gasp and cry of pain tore from her lips.

"How about now?" Buffy started. The voice was Dawn's! Of course-it was Dawn's dream. She had known that since the moment the green light started moving toward her. But-Dawn? Seriously? Dawn's voice continued. "You look like you've got something you want to say to me. Of course, that's just because I'm looking at you. You _always _have something to say. Come on, Buffy. What's tonight's lecture about? Did you forget your syllabus, professor?"

_Thwack!_

"Dawn, this is enough," Buffy began, and Buffy started. She had not tried to speak this time! Her dream-self, her Dawn's-dream-self, was acting on its own. And it didn't sound like her. Its voice held nothing of the concern for Dawn's safety that Buffy always made sure she put first in her mind when she had to try to remind Dawn that she wasn't a Slayer; this was condescending and _patronizing_. It was, indeed, like she was beginning a lecture. "I'm not trying to lecture ..."

"Oh, no? It's just that effortless?" Buffy felt Dawn's hands at either side of her head, and a moment later, the blindfold tore away.

Dream-Buffy and real-Buffy-_should I even call myself that? I'm dreaming, too?_-Both Buffies gasped. The Dawn that stood before her was nothing like the innocent, often-petulant younger sister that Buffy remembered growing up fighting to protect. She stood before Buffy in a short-sleeved black jacket and form-fitting trousers of supple, oiled midnight leather, the jacket held together by only a single button just below Dawn's chest. Fingerless gloves of the same material helped her maintain her grip on a long, curved whip that pulsed darkly with an umbral radiance beyond the range of seeing. Her hair was pulled back away from her face. Her eyes were bright, focused, and predatory, and deep within them, Buffy could see sparks of green fire, emerald suns burning at the bottom of a fathomless ocean.

They stood on the glassine floor of a high, domed cavern. Buffy was naked from the waist up save for the high collar, and her arms were held aloft by soft-lined but unforgiving manacles of some unfamiliar dark hide. The cord holding them up vanished into impenetrable blackness.

"I've got a better idea," Dawn said. "Why don't _I _give _you_ a lecture for a change?"

Buffy, the part of her that remembered being sucked into this dream, this nightmare, tried to simply grit her teeth and fight to free herself. The dream-her that she had come to share bodies with since entering Dawn's dream had other ideas. "Because you need to know what you're talking about first." She couldn't believe that the dream-her had just said that.

Dawn's eyes burned. One minute, she was standing three strides away from Buffy; the next, she was next to Buffy, who, despite her struggles, and despite what should have been vastly superior strength, couldn't stop Dawn from forcing a thick, balled knot in the center of a long black scarf past Buffy's teeth, winding it around her mouth, and tying it off tightly behind her head. The tiny sliver of Buffy's consciousness that was still her own goggled.

"Lesson one," Dawn began, pushing Buffy's head down from behind, her arms somehow able to accommodate the move, though she could no longer see to where the cord above her head led. Buffy found herself bent forward at the waist, looking at the high, black boots inlaid with silver that Dawn had dreamed upon herself. "Helpless screaming."

Buffy learned well.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTES:** Thanks again to everyone who has viewed this and reviewed this over the years; it's rewarding to be able to make a somewhat rarer Buffy crossover stand out on . My free time has become more limited over the past couple of years, so it's possible that there will just be another few chapters and then another long hiatus, but nevertheless, I've thoroughly enjoyed writing this and certainly intend to work on it as best I can in the future.

**COMING SOON:** Chapter 10, "Sisters and Rivals." Buffy and Dawn wake with their thoughts of Buffy's excess; meanwhile, Faith meets another of the Heroes in _Tel'aran'rhiod_.


	10. Sisters and Rivals

**DISCLAIMER:** I own neither Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the Wheel of Time; they are the property of their respective authors, publishers, and probably a half-dozen other entities woven together in a more complicated weave than the Age Lace. If I could figure that out, I'd be a good IP lawyer. If I were the author, I'd be making you pay to read this. Unfortunately, looking around my rather Spartan apartment, I think it's safe to say that I'm neither, or I'd be driving a Tesla Roadster. Don't sic the Trollocs on me.

**SPOILERS/BACKGROUND: **All Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel through Season 4 (no secondary sources, however); all main books of the Wheel of Time through _Knife of Dreams_. Of course, the WoT-verse is sufficiently complex that I'd be hard pressed to get everything right.

* * *

**CHAPTER 10:**

** SISTERS AND RIVALS**

"Dawn? Dawn!"

Dawn was suddenly aware of cold stone beneath her body, and gentle but firm hands on her shoulders, shaking her awake. She bolted upright with a start, and Kennedy fell away from her, concern melting suddenly to wariness in her eyes.

"Dawn? You all right? You looked like you were having a nightmare."

Dawn forced her breathing to steady as best she could. "I guess I was," she admitted. She kept her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt, willing herself not to look at them, hoping that Kennedy had not noticed the rope marks on her wrists.

* * *

"Buffy ever talk about Dawn much?" Kennedy asked.

"Not really," Rona replied. She, Kennedy, and Vi were seated near the base of the stairs heading up to the stone platform, arranging rocks as best they could to get something to sit on. "Never really had much of a chance."

"I know she was almost killed a couple of years ago," Vi offered. "Some god or cult or something."

"Yeah ... I'm starting to think we don't know the whole story there. Like why her of all people?"

"Well, because she's Buffy's sister? Someone wanted to get to her?"

"Maybe," Kennedy replied. "Or maybe not. You know we can sense trouble, right?"

"Sort of," Rona offered hesitantly. "I mean, I know Buffy and Faith could ... I don't know, they like ..."

"... knew when something was coming up behind them? At least sometimes?"

"Yeah, they said that. Didn't work too well in the cave, though," Vi said sadly. Too many of their sisters had been felled from behind. Even Buffy had gotten struck from behind there; the chaos had simply been too overwhelming.

"Yeah, well it's less crazy here now," Kennedy continued. "Now-where is Dawn?"

Rona and Vi looked around. "Um, I don't see her."

"You don't have to," Kennedy continued. "Just feel it. Just sense and take a guess."

The other two Slayers with her took a deep breath, still not quite understanding, more humoring Kennedy than actually obliging, but then, suddenly, both of them pointed at the same instant to the same tent, on the far side of the camp. Giles' tent.

"Whoa," Rona mouthed softly.

"I could point to her with my eyes shut, and it actually makes the skin on my back prickle whenever I'm facing the other direction from her," Kennedy said. "Like some part of me is warning the rest of me not to turn my back."

"Dawn?!" Vi asked incredulously.

"Tell me I'm wrong."

"I ... just, wow."

"That's nothing," Kennedy said. "You should have seen her when I found her earlier."

* * *

Giles was losing his struggle to keep his eyes open. Books in Latin, Old English, Sumerian, and a largely-forgotten ancestor of Welsh lay scattered around him, including the one he had been trying to read. It was an old Celtic epic about mythic heroes and villains emerging from stones and vanishing into them again; it probably had little, if any, connection to the mysterious stone not a hundred yards away, but he was grasping at straws. He only hoped that Dr. Burkle was having more luck.

He extinguished the portable light and lay down on the bedroll. The flap of his tent parted a moment later. In walked Dawn. He couldn't see much more than her silhouette and some of her hair where the moonlight from outside caught it. He sat up.

"Hello, Dawn," he said, fighting back a yawn. "Sorry, I was just about to turn in ..."

"Buffy's alive," Dawn cut him off.

Giles sat bolt upright. "What? Is she back?"

"No," Dawn repeated. "She's still in the other world, but we met in the middle. In our dreams."

Giles' eyes narrowed skeptically.

"You sure it really was her?"

"Oh, it was _definitely_ her."

Giles listened for any hint of doubt in Dawn's voice. There was none. He couldn't read her body language very well in the darkness, either, but what he could see betrayed no uncertainty. In fact, she barely even seemed uneasy, which was a rarity for Dawn. She was serious.

"Is she in trouble?" Giles asked.

Dawn gave a low, coughing sob that might almost have been a laugh had Giles not known better who uttered it. "Yes," Dawn said slowly. "She is."

* * *

"I understand," Angel said. "Good to hear. Not great, but good."

"I know." Giles' voice cracked from the far end of the speakerphone. Angel had gathered Wesley and Fred to hear the news all at once. Spike had somehow managed to barge his way into the meeting as well.

"I'm sending Fred back to you with a field arcanist unit," Angel said. "As soon as I can get the choppers moving."

"All right, boss!" Fred's eyes kindled with excitement. She all but danced from the room. The team was still settling into the uneasy role of management team of the most evil lawyers to ever practice law or evil, but the size of the research budget here had been quickly assuaging Fred's unease. Even the professor who had banished her to slavery in Pylea never had a tenth of the resources she had here. The Portal Stone could be the biggest find in interdimensional arcanophysics since the Key itself, and she had been told in no uncertain terms that the latter was not an available research subject.

"Wes, book time," Angel continued. "Dreamworlds, Portal Stones ..."

"Already on it," Wes said, quickly following Fred from the room.

"Also, Angel?"

"Yeah."

"I may be getting old and paranoid, but I'm not sure Dawn was telling me everything."

Angel was silent for a long time. More surprisingly, so was Spike. The two shared a long, considering gaze.

"Angel?" Giles' voice crackled again.

"Just keep an eye on her," Angel said after another long pause.

* * *

Buffy couldn't remember losing consciousness, but she became suddenly aware of her awareness returning, her thoughts swirling irresolutely like colors in a kaleidoscope.

She flexed her arms, and a distant, primal part of her reminded the rest of her mind that her hands were free.

Awareness crystallized between one heartbeat and the next, fueled by adrenalin and preternatural self-preservation reflexes. She shot forward, taking a blindingly fast first stride that should have been impossible for someone in her prone position. She was ten yards away from Faith before the feel of sand underneath her bare feet and the crisp, natural chill of the nocturnal desert breeze brought her brought her conscious mind back into alignment with her instincts. She was awake.

Faith, who had simply been nudging Buffy awake, had leapt to one side and rolled into a tumbling dodge. The dying embers of the campfire cast half of her face in faint crimson light and flickering shadows; concern and surprised were etched on every feature Buffy could see.

"B? You all right?" Faith asked. She seemed confused.

Buffy's eyes widened, and she cast a quick glance at her wrists and ankles. They were unmarked. She could tell that her back was unmarred as well, though she could not see it; she knew the difference between pain that was a physical wound and the stinging aftermath of the memory of a dream.

_But oh, what a memory ..._

She collapsed to her knees and covered her head in her hands. She did everything she could to hold back the sobs that threatened to choke her; she failed miserably. _God, Dawn, what did I do? Do you hate me that much? _But of course she did. Buffy had no right to expect anything less, not after the unforgivably harsh lesson that she had visited upon her unsuspecting sister.

She was dimly aware of Faith coming and laying out Buffy's bedroll beside her, and easing Buffy back down into it. A moment later, Faith joined her, resting Buffy's head on her shoulder and cradling her gently from behind. Buffy felt Faith's hand gliding gently through her hair. She curled up even more tightly.

"Don't let me fall back asleep," she breathed.

"I won't," Faith promised. "Don't sleep. Just rest. What the hell happened, anyway?"

Buffy choked back another labored breath in reply. "Tell you in the morning."

Faith clearly burned with the need to know more, but held her tongue. Buffy sighed and enjoyed the warmth of her sister Slayer's arms for a while longer. How long, she could not say. Eventually, however, she felt the tears beginning to ebb, perhaps as much from exhaustion as anything else. Her eyes stung. She rolled away from Faith, though.

"You get some sleep," she said. "She ... what happened to me won't happen to you, I promise. She's only mad at me."

"She?"

"Just ... if you find yourself floating in what feels like stars-dreams-don't get too close to any of them. They can suck you in."

Faith processed that. "You mean you spent all night in someone else's dream? Is that where you were?"

Buffy nodded.

"But ... what happens to you there _doesn't_ follow you out? I mean, you're not bleeding or ..." Faith trailed off as she caught Buffy's eyes. "I'm just saying-it could be bad, but spending all night in someone else's dream might be better than being somewhere where some dream-sword can kill the real you."

"No," Buffy shook her head angrily, wishing her eyes would stop stinging. "I'll take the sword."

Faith didn't press the issue. "You going to make it to morning?"

Buffy nodded. "I'll be fine. Just ... need some time. Get some sleep. I'll be good to go when I wake you up."

Faith gave Buffy a long, silent look but then nodded, half to herself. Buffy guessed she might have said something had she had more energy, but it was after four in the morning, even Slayers needed sleep, and neither of them were getting the quantity or quality of it they needed sleeping only half of every night on watch against the Aiel Waste and the other half trapped in the Aiel dreamworld. Faith was asleep within seconds after allowing her head to touch the tiny pillow they shared.

The soft, ambient unlight of the dreamworld, now familiar to Faith, let her know that she had fallen asleep. She looked quickly around, but appeared to be alone, and her Slayer-sense was mute. The tents and the wagon, so temporarily in one place, made almost no impression on the dreamworld here; while they occasionally flickered in and out of her vision like afterimages seen after turning from a bright light, the land was for the most part as empty as it would have been had she been walking the desert alone and on foot. Even of the earth-elemental horses, probably the most solid things in the camp, there was little sign-where the conjured horses stood in the waking world, here sat only the two large boulders from which they had been formed.

She looked up at the sky. The stars burned there as brightly as they did in the waking world-possibly even moreso, as brightness and darkness were hard to judge in this place. She considered the possibility that Buffy had meant to sound some kind of warning against trying to fly into the night sky, but dismissed that out of hand. Whatever Buffy had meant, if she had meant to sound a warning against trying to go excessively airborne, she would have been much more direct about it. Buffy was no cryptic sensei. If she had something she didn't want you to do, she made it very clear that you understood what it was.

She turned once, scanning the horizon, though inwardly she was starting to come to terms with the fact that that was probably a useless gesture; dangers here could literally materialize out of thin air, and just because you couldn't see something in no way meant that it couldn't see you. In fact, if you were careless with your thoughts, you could create _it_ yourself. She forced her thoughts away from the direction that led.

Moments later, she was sleeping in the basement of the Hyperion again.

* * *

In the morning, they bade farewell to Hurac and the Shaido in the grey light of morning before the sun crested the mountains far to the east. It would have been foggy in the green suburban community of Sunnydale at that hour, but there would be no morning mist for the sun to burn away in this parched desert. Willow noted that the Shaido had somehow disposed of the corpses of the _draghkar_ while she slept; how and where, she didn't ask. She checked the wagon as best she could and fed a little extra earth energy into the conjured horses pulling it; this was not her forte, and the spell animating the horses leaked energy from the seams where she hadn't sealed it against loss as well as necessary. Without occasional maintenance, she and her Slayer companions would find themselves with a wagon hitched to two giant boulders in the middle of nowhere, and reanimating them here would take far, far more effort than in the wellspring of raw elemental power that was Rhuidean. She still shuddered in frightened excitement at the memory, and instinctively ran a hand through her hair, looking for blossoms. There were none.

Faith looked as rested as could be expected on the short sleep hours that the Slayers had been getting. Buffy, however, looked almost worse than if she hadn't slept at all; she had known Buffy to pull all-nighters in high school, and she seldom looked that haggard. Something had happened, though the summer-haired Slayer did not appear to be wounded.

"You want to talk about it?" Willow asked as soon as the Shaido, moving in the opposite direction, were just a speck on the eastern horizon.

Buffy started. "Talk about what?"

"Whatever happened last night."

Buffy took a deep breath. "Not really."

Willow bit back the urge to say _talk to me about it anyway_. She forced herself to take a deep breath and simply murmur, "OK." She put her arm around Buffy's shoulders. Buffy actually flinched for a moment, though she relaxed a moment later, the faintest touch of red staining her cheeks.

Willow took a deep breath and turned her gaze to the far horizon again. There wasn't anything to see, of course-or at least, nothing that she could see; the Aiel seemed to be able to merge into the rocks and sands as if by magic. She tried to concentrate on rock formations and sand dunes, but the scenery was simply nowhere near up to the challenge of distracting her from the swirling, rushing river of invisible light at the edge of her awareness.

_Saidar_, Egwene and the Wise Ones had called it. The energy or force that powered magic as it was practiced in this world. There was nothing else it could be. It was nothing like the more normal mirages visible out of the corner of her mortal eyes; she wouldn't have mistaken it for that even had Egwene and the Wise Ones said nothing of it. Egwene had also told her that those who began to touch it on their own, untutored, had only about a one in four chance of surviving a year if they didn't find someone to teach them-which basically meant finding their way to Tar Valon. Egwene's warning had been convincing, and she had resolved not to try to touch it at all before they reached Tar Valon.

That resolve was fraying.

It wasn't just that _saidar_ was always there. It was more than that. That river of invisible light was like a living thing, and calling to her. And unlike the great tree of Rhuidean, she couldn't get in a wagon and drive away from this.

"That stupid stone," Buffy spat. "Save one world, get sucked into another one."

Willow laughed, more loudly than the remark probably deserved, grateful for the distraction. "No cosmic justice in either cosmos," she noted.

"Tch. One unfair world I could deal with. Two is just too much."

"We'll be back in our own unfair world before too long. Don't worry. Just don't get killed in the meantime."

"Good advice."

"I try."

"So how far to Tar Valon?"

"More than a thousand miles. Even being able to travel twenty-four hours a day, it's a week trip, and that's assuming no unpleasant surprises."

Buffy sighed. "So it goes. All right, I'm going to try sleeping again. Wake me if it looks like something's trying to kill me or you."

"Isn't something always trying to kill you?"

Buffy wrinkled her nose. "Well, wake me if it looks like they're succeeding." She clambered back into the wagon and settled into the little nest of softer _ter'angreal_ and bedrolls that they had made for sleeping on the march.

Faith climbed out of the wagon and seated herself where Buffy had just vacated. Willow's eyes widened. She had a quiver of arrows on her back-and in her hands, she carried the silver-enruned longbow Willow had seen her hefting back in Rhuidean.

"Um, you sure you should be playing with that?"

"I'd rather have this than a sword if any more of those bat-thingies show up."

"They gave us regular bows, you know."

Faith grinned. "Tch. Boring."

"You have no idea what that thing does."

"Pretty sure it shoots arrows."

Willow rolled her eyes exasperatedly. "You have no idea what _else_ it does."

Faith nodded sagely. "You know, good point." Before Willow could utter a word of warning-not that it would have done her any good, she reflected, knowing Faith-the raven-haired Slayer drew and loosed an arrow at an unoffending rock some distance to the right of the wagon.

She missed badly, but nothing else happened.

"I'm not pulling this wagon over to go get that back."

"No worries!" Faith smiled. She hopped off the wagon, trotted back to where the arrow lay in the sand, and ran effortlessly back to the wagon, leaping up onto the wagon tongue with no visible difficulty.

"You about gave me a heart attack."

"My aim wasn't _that_ bad. I was trying to attack that rock in the heart."

"Was that your first time ever shooting a bow?"

Faith nodded. "Pretty fun, actually!" She drew again and loosed, this time at a rock some distance in front of them and slightly off to the right; this let her jump from the wagon and retrieve the arrow quickly as they passed. She still missed, the arrow driving into the ground a few feet short of her target, but her aim was much improved.

Willow shook her head helplessly. "Just remember that every single one of these things does something, somehow, with the Power. Magic."

"Well, hopefully, they didn't design this thing as a booby trap to shoot the person firing it," Faith said. "But if I were designing a magic bow, I'd probably make it better at shooting targets, not shooters."

"Doesn't look like it's that great at that, either."

"Oh, ye of little faith," Faith grinned. "I'm a Slayer. I'll get the hang of it."

Willow had no idea what the normal learning curve was for mastering the longbow, but she was certain by the time they woke Buffy up for lunch that Faith was climbing it more quickly than normal. She was hitting rocks, even some that weren't all that big, at fifty yards more often than not. She had tested the maximum range of the red-enameled bow and found it to be many times that, but she hadn't been able to hit anything much smaller than a sand dune at that range. Willow had offered a quick restorative charm after she had fired a few shots, but Faith had demurred, and Willow had not pressed the issue; even after a hundred shots, Faith's hands and shoulders didn't appear to be giving her any trouble.

Buffy, predictably, was less willing to let Faith's experimentation slide. "Faith, what are you doing with that?" she asked, seeing the bow in Faith's hands.

"Target practice," Faith answered with a smirk, drawing and loosing an arrow at an innocent boulder a ways in front of the wagon.

"Faith! Do you have any idea what that thing does?"

Faith grinned. "Pretty sure it shoots arrows." Willow rolled her eyes.

"Pretty sure we already have _normal_ bows for that," Buffy noted. "As in, the kind that aren't three-thousand-year-old who-knows-what-kind-of-magic bows."

"Exactly!" Faith grinned. "You've got a boring old normal bow, and I've got a three-thousand-year-old magic bow."

"Faith, you could get yourself killed using that thing."

"Yes, but you'd still have me beat by one death if that happens."

"Faith!"

"Seriously, it's a bow. Until I see something to make me believe that it's _not_ meant for shooting things, I'm going to guess that whoever made it had shooting things in mind. We're carrying around however-many-thousand-year-old magic swords, remember?"

"All they are is extra sharp and hard."

"And you know this because Egwene told you that? Suddenly you trust her? For all you know, she could have given us Nerf swords."

"Well ... we know she wanted this load of stuff safe. But she didn't say we should just pull stuff out and start _using_ it."

"Didn't completely say not to, either, though."

"Do you really think she'll be cool with it?"

"Do you really care?"

"_I_ care," Willow interjected. It was true that she didn't completely trust Egwene herself, but she believed that Egwene was ultimately on the side of "the good guys," whoever they were here, and just as importantly, Egwene was their best link to any shot at getting home. Didn't Faith and Buffy realize that doing anything to antagonize her was probably not the best idea?

"We've been here five days and we've already been attacked by our own shadows and soul-sucking bat-thingies," Faith pointed out. "Unless you really think this thing's booby-trapped, don't you think we ought to be loading up? You're pulling out a few new tricks yourself, you know. And from what I can tell, you're going to be picking up a few more whether you like it or not."

Willow's breath caught. That was too close to what she had been thinking about before she had managed to let Buffy and Faith distract her earlier.

Faith must have noticed something in her eyes. "Started happening already?"

"No!" Willow replied quickly. Too quickly.

Buffy's attention turned from Faith to Willow. "Will?"

"I haven't touched it yet," Willow clarified. "But I can sense it. Heck, I can practically _see_ it."

"Son of a ..." Buffy trailed off.

Willow nodded. "Yeah."

"What Egwene said about, you know, channeling it even if you don't want to?"

Willow sighed. "I'm holding it as long as I can, Buffy, but it's going to come out eventually."

"You make it sound like going to the bathroom," Faith observed sardonically.

"Eh, pressure, building up, all that," Willow replied dryly. "But really, not kidding."

"Well, even if it happens, she said that most people make it at least a year, and some people figure it out all on their own."

"Only one in four," Willow reminded her.

"You're one in a million, Wills," Buffy smiled. "One in a billion. We'll make it to Tar Valon, and even if we don't, well, you'll figure it out."

"What she said," Faith added.

Willow laughed, and her spirits lightened a little. What had she done to deserve friends like this? They were plodding across a barren, almost featureless desert in an alien world. They had been captured, then befriended their captors, then left them. Their own shadows had tried to kill them, and someone they had never even heard of had already tried to assassinate them. The sun burned overhead as if twice as close to this world as to their own, and the desert sand radiated the heat back at the sky-and anything traveling upon the sands-as if in anger. Yet somehow, she couldn't help but feel that everything would be all right. She had her friends. She forced herself to remember, against her more modest instincts, that she was not as helpless as she had been her sophomore year of high school, when Buffy Summers had arrived on the campus of Sunnydale High. She was all too aware of her own mortality, but she was also one of the most feared witches on the entire planet from which she had come, and probably from several dimensions beyond. They would make it.

She cast her eyes on the distance. There was a power there, dark and brooding, like nothing she had ever seen. High above the horizon it rose, stretching across the entire horizon. It was remote and distant now, but they were heading right for it.

"Let Faith use the bow," she said.

"Um, huh?" Buffy's eyebrows raised. She was certainly not used to the redheaded Wiccan taking Faith's side over hers.

"And start practicing with it yourself. And the smaller ones the Aiel gave us. We're going to have to fight again before we're out of here. I don't want you to be the best ammunition in Faith's arsenal."

Buffy made a face. "If I turn into a toad the moment I shoot this thing ..." she warned.

"... then I'll change you back," Willow finished with a gentle smile. "You've always had my back, Buffy, but I've got yours, too, you know."

Willow wondered if her words had the same effect on Buffy that Buffy's and Faith's had on her. She shook her head in resignation, with a soft smile. Then, having made a decision, she turned to Faith. "All right, give me that thing," she said. "You go get some sleep. We both probably need that more than fancy new weapons."

"Now _that_, you're not kidding about," Faith replied.

"That reminds me," Buffy said. "Something I ... something I thought of the other night, and I can't believe I forgot to ask until now. Will ... this goes under 'got our back' ... is there any way you can make us sleep without dreaming?"

Faith gave a start and turned back to Willow just as she was about to step back into the shaded interior of the wagon. There was a sudden hunger in her eyes, which impressed on her more than anything else just how vulnerable the two Slayers felt sleeping in the World of Dreams.

She sighed. "Actually, working on it," she said. "I learned a little bit in England, but it's like all the rules here are different somehow. Or more like, there was no _Tel'aran'rhiod_ there, or at least, I never learned about it. I learned a little about controlling my own dreams, but not dreamworlds. You saw me with Egwene." She choked on the last sentence and blushed at the memory; they had seen _all_ of her with Egwene. "I was actually working on it last night in my own dreams."

"I saw that!" Buffy said, a wondering expression suddenly coming over her face. "You were at the high school."

Willow was stunned. "Wait, you _saw_ me? Like, you were watching me?"

"Just for a moment," Buffy added quickly. "But ... yeah, Willow, even when you're just inside your own dreams here, you're apparently right up against _Tel'aran'rhiod_. Or maybe even really in it, just in some different way. I could see in. It was like looking in a window, or maybe a crystal ball ... hard to describe, but you get the point."

"Oh, Goddess ..." She wasn't about to ask if Buffy had also seen any dreams she had had about Tara. Buffy wasn't saying anything. Discretion was the better part of preserving any possible scraps of dignity.

"Guess you'd better add dream-warding or dream-cloaking or whatever to your to-do list," Faith added with a grim laugh. "But yeah ... you want to try what you've got so far on me?"

"Like I said, it's really not ready."

"What's the worst that could happen? It just doesn't work, right?"

"Or it traps you in some nightmare forever, or until something in it rips your heart out. You really want me to use you for guinea pigs before I'm ready?"

"Yes," Buffy and Faith answered in unison. Willow's eyebrows raised. Things were _bad_.

"Sorry," she said flatly. "On this, trust me, I've 'got your back' more by saying 'not yet.'"

Faith looked at her for another moment, then nodded. "All right, well, same deal as before, then. I'm going to have to keep working on getting the hang of this dreaming thing. Just hiding every time isn't going to work. Something will find us there eventually."

Willow nodded. "I know, Faith. I really know. Good luck. Hey," she forced her smile to brighten long enough to send the raven-haired Slayer off on a more positive note, as best she could. "If I can get the hang of a whole new kind of magic, you can get the hang of kicking ass even while you're asleep."

Faith laughed then, a rich, predatory laugh that momentarily banished the weariness from her voice. "Damn straight," she agreed. She gave a quick smile to Buffy, as if to make sure that Buffy had heard the message, too, then clambered back into the wagon.

* * *

The soft unlight of _Tel'aran'rhiod_ welcomed Faith again. The burn of the sunlight was almost so harsh as to drown out the soft unlight of the dreamworld, but she recognized where she was nevertheless. Edges were softer, reality slightly less distinct, save for herself and the clothes that she had dreamed for herself. She found herself in her tan desert camouflage again, with the dagger Mayor Wilkins had given her at her side. She frowned at it. It kind of disturbed her that that thing kept coming back to her when she felt the need for a weapon close to hand. She had a new weapon now, and one far better than any ordinary dagger, no matter how artfully forged. With a thought, the dagger morphed into the Power-wrought blade Egwene had given her at Rhuidean.

She surveyed her surroundings again and gave a start. Strands of misty energy in a hundred pale colors floated in the air not far from where she stood, spiraling gently like sparks caught in a swirling wind, only in slow motion. She brought her blade up, but whatever it was made no move to attack her. In fact, it was moving slowly _away_ from her.

Temporarily forgetting fleeing to the Hyperion, she followed it westward for a minute before she realized what she was seeing. _It's the wagon!_ More accurately, she reasoned, her mind leaping into overdrive, it was some effect that that massive pile of magical doohickeys in the back of the wagon was having on the World of Dreams as they passed. Many of those little trinkets, those _ter'angreal_, had appeared full and solid at Rhuidean, where they had lain for who knew how many centuries, after all. Apparently they didn't completely vanish when on the move. At least, not with such a massive trove of them piled together. Well, if she ever needed to find Buffy and Willow's corresponding location in the real world, she knew where to look.

Her blood froze as she realized the implication of that. _If I could do that, then _anyone_ could do that. We might as well be wearing a sign that says "hey, over here.."_ She turned to scan the horizon again.

What to do? She couldn't just walk alongside the luminescent wisps until she awoke. She needed real sleep. There was only one of her. Also, the point wasn't to guard the wagon, it was to hide it so that no one could follow them across the desert from the dreamworld. Could whoever sent those _draghkar_ even reach this dreamworld? It seemed to be the way to bet, with everything else going on.

She took a breath and began to try to form a vision in her mind of _nothingness_, of empty sand where the treasures were. It didn't work. Was it because she just couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of empty air where she knew there was something? She glanced down and willed her sword to vanish. It did. She brought it back. Apparently these magic whatever-the-hecks couldn't be simply willed out of existence here.

She thought briefly about trying to hide the trail of sparks in the middle of a sandstorm, but anyone watching them would know very well that a sandstorm that barely moved was hiding something.

_Have to ask Willow about that. Gotta be something she can do, but I need to sleep._

A woman's voice spoke not three feet behind her. "So the rumors are true. Sineya's spirit walks the dream again, in new flesh."

Faith spun, the heron-mark blade rising to riposte off the golden-orange blade of the woman behind her. A shower of sparks erupted in all directions from the clash. The other woman flowed away from the blow effortlessly. She did not step. Her form simply shifted. One moment, her blade was locked against Faith's; the next, she was five yards away. Faith's eyes narrowed. This was someone who knew how to manipulate the dreamworld the way she and Buffy did. The way the Aiel did, possibly.

Her features were vaguely Asian and vaguely European, though of course, neither of those continents existed in this place. Faith had no idea what land that made her from here. She looked as though she were maybe ten years older than Faith and in the prime of health, but her eyes were far, far older than that, and spoke of someone who knew how to use the sword in her hands as well as _Tel'aran'rhiod_ itself. Gold and orange highlights in her hair gave the appearance that the woman and blade were part of a set, as though they had been forged by the same master craftsman.

The woman laughed as the sparks from the meeting of their blades fell to the ground. The impact had produced ten times as many as it should have. "Definitely her," she mused. "That was Sineya's most common way of saying hello, too."

Faith's grip on her weapon never softened. "You were the one who appeared behind me. And my name's Faith."

"So Gaidal told me. You really have no memory of being Sineya, do you?" Faith was about to respond, but the woman shook her head. "I can see it in your eyes. Amazing. Well, the Wheel has not brought you even to the dreamworld, much less the waking world, in two thousand years; who can say what happens to one of us in that span of eons?"

"You know that guy Buffy was talking about? And what do you mean, 'one of us?'"

"So there really are two of you carrying Sineya's soul," the woman mused. She smiled wanly and shook her head. "One was enough to deal with."

"Not funny and not answering me."

The woman laughed. "You don't remember me, either, do you?"

"Should I?"

"I remember you," the woman answered. "Or who you were, at least." Her tone shifted subtly as she spoke, growing stronger, less casual. "In a hundred legends, we fight side by side as sisters against the Shadow, light and darkness aligned in balance, a dual-edged blade against the chaos that would engulf the world. In a hundred more, we challenge each other, in single combat or at the heads of armies, handmaidens and generals of day and night in their eternal struggle for mastery over the other." She lifted her sword, and it was suddenly limned in pale golden flames that gave off no smoke, like faint waves of sunlight. "In every tale, I carry this, the Sword of the Sun, though the way I come to possess it might be different with every telling. Sineya's arsenal shifted as the moon, though, and almost to the last nail, they were of her own making. In some tales, she carried a simple sword like you carry now, if any heron-mark blade might be called _simple_. In others, she carried a mighty scythe with the handle wrought into a short spear. She built it to absorb the power of the sun during the daylight hours, and work itself into the steel to cut deep into Shadowspawn who could not bear its touch. In yet more, she carried a shortsword that separated into a chain whip with razor edges. In the last tale the Wheel wove her into, she carried nothing but a curved dagger, set in the pommel with a ruby. She designed it to absorb the darkest, most primeval passions and instincts of everyone in her city and focus it into power for the blade."

The most disturbing thing to Faith was that as the woman talked, she could _see_ some of the unfamiliar weapons that the woman spoke of. The Scythe, she knew all too well, though it had been a stake for stabbing vampires, not a true spear, at the end. The shortsword that extended into a chain whip had had a safety catch to keep the chain from being released accidentally, and it was important to keep the internal compartment oiled in order to ensure that the chain would unfurl smoothly when released. The curved dagger's quillions had been golden-scaled serpents, their fangs bared to strike. The ruby did more than merely absorb the emotions and urges of those nearby, too; it fed them, like a farmer tending his field in anticipation of a greater harvest. She almost felt that she could hear the name of the woman in front of her, too, even though the woman with the burning sword had not yet identified herself and she had never met anyone remotely like her before in her life.

Almost. "Who are you?" she asked.

"Do you really not remember?"

"Already said that."

The woman gave her a searching look, then nodded. "I go by Amerasu."

It clicked into place in Faith's mind, and she nodded. Then she grinned. She was overcome with a sudden impulse to remind this woman-and herself-that she was still Faith. "Talk about a mouthful. Think I can call you Amy?"

Amerasu crooked an eyebrow at her. It was a very humanizing gesture. Faith grinned.

"I have borne many other names in my days," she noted. "I suppose one more won't hurt. Although I can't recall one quite so ... _familiar_."

"Hey, first time for everything, right, even for you guys who get reborn every now and then, right?"

Amerasu chuckled. "Perhaps, though Sineya's irreverence for social conventions might not be entirely new."

"Hey, guess I come by it honestly."

"That you do ... Faith," Amerasu replied, saying Faith's name as though experimenting to see how it sounded.

Faith nodded. "So, Amy, what brings you to my neck of the woods?"

The woman laughed, and gave Faith a look.

"Me?" Faith asked. "Seriously?"

"Of course," Amerasu replied. "It's been six hundred years since the Wheel spun me forth to renew my legend. Even in _Tel'aran'rhiod_, existence can grow tedious in that span of years."

Faith's eyes widened. "You're six hundred years old?"

Amerasu laughed grimly. "I remember dozens of lifetimes more than that, and even longer stretches of waiting in the dream for the Wheel to call me forth again. The Age of Legends is twenty-five centuries past now, and I remember several lives in those yoregone days. Beyond that, the mists of time are thick even to us."

Faith shook her head. "Wish I could say the same, but like I said, Sineya's just a name to me. I'm twenty. No plus-a-couple-centuries of extra memories from previous lives."

"And yet the fact of being reborn into the living world again and again is not foreign to you. The suggestion that _you_ might be is not foreign to you."

Faith shrugged. "There's a whole lot going on right now that's pretty damn _foreign_ to me. But that? Not so different than what I've been told about us where I come from. Only unfortunately, we'd don't get the whole extra-lifetimes of memories. Kinda sucks, actually. Might have been really handy."

"Neither do we," Amerasu noted. "When the Wheel spins us forth, we come into the world as all other men and women do-babes in our mothers' arms. We don't remember _Tel'aran'rhiod_, or our former lives. In my last life, I died never even having heard of the dreamworld."

"Tch. What a rip."

Amerasu was silent for a moment as she tried to process that turn of phrase. A light breeze caught her hair in the silence, and the diffuse, omnipresent light of _Tel'aran'rhiod_ reflected off the highlights in her hair as though they were polished metal.

"You don't remember the blademaster's sword forms, either, do you?"

Faith thought about that for a moment. "Guessing not," she answered. "Don't get me wrong, Slayers just kind of get fighting-it's kind of in our blood-but I never had lessons or anything. Just lots of practice." Actually, even that wasn't completely true when it came to an honest-to-goodness longsword. Stakes, bare hands, and one familiar dagger were most of what she had used during her Slaying career.

"Then I suggest we work on that," Amerasu replied.

Faith was stunned. "You want to _teach_ me? Swordfighting?"

"The Last Battle approaches. If you bear Sineya's spirit, you will be there, I have no doubt of that ..."

"Ugh. Thanks, Amy," Faith cut her off.

"I have no idea what this other world Gaidal mentioned has been your home is like," Amerasu replied pointedly, "but am I wrong in guessing that battles seem to seek you out there like bloodhounds?"

Faith scowled. "Well, I never said you were wrong." She had said the same thing to Buffy not so long ago, in fact, but it sounded different coming from a near-complete stranger like Amerasu.

"In which case, you will need to be ready."

"Did you say that half the time, when we're both in the living world, we're enemies?"

"Not against the Shadow," Amerasu replied. "Sineya was often as brutal in fighting the Shadow as the Shadow itself ever was, particularly in her last incarnation before she vanished, but she always _did_ fight it."

"Hm, the more I hear about this girl, the more I kinda like her."

"That may change," Amerasu replied. "And I would be cautious about letting anyone know that you were part of the fall of Aridhol. The people renamed it _Shadar Logoth_ after its fall, and even though it has now been utterly destroyed, it was an accursed ruin for two millennia, and common men still shudder at the name."

"Well all right, then," Faith replied lightly. "Looks like I at least don't have a high bar to clear to do better than last time."

Amerasu laughed mirthlessly. "True enough," she admitted.

"See? All about looking on the bright side."

"Now that's a side of Sineya I admit I never saw."

"Hey, new person here, remember? I might be her magical uber-great-great-whatever granddaughter, but I'm not her."

"So you said," Amerasu noted, taking a few strides away from Faith. When she turned back, the Sword of the Sun was sheathed at her waist, and she held a wooden replica of it in her hand. "And with most of the weapons from Sineya used over the years, I can't help you relearn what she knew. If you've chosen the simple sword as your weapon in this incarnation, though-well, that I might be able to help with."

Faith couldn't help shaking her head. The contrails of energy from the whatzits-the _ter'angreal_-in the wagon were still floating in the air near where they stood, but there was apparently no helping that for the moment. She entertained the notion for a moment that Amerasu was trying to lure her into lowering her guard, but she had had the best opportunity she was likely to get before Faith ever knew she was there, and instead had just stopped in to chat. She was sure Amerasu was playing some kind of longer game, but she could work with that in the meantime.

"I think I've got some time to kill," Faith replied. She fixed the notion of a wooden replica of her own sword in her mind, and the heron-mark blade morphed in her hand to match. _At least this girl probably knows a thing or two more about this than any of my Watchers ever did_, she thought. _Way cuter, too._ "All right. Let's see these _blademaster's sword forms_ of yours. Maybe I'll even learn something."

Amerasu grinned and lowered herself into a fighting stance. "First form," she began, "River of Light."

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTES:** Well, at least this chapter came faster than the last one, right? Thanks to everyone who has stuck with this story since its inception, and to all of the new readers as well. I hope I can keep you entertained until _A Memory of Light_ arrives.

_Nimbus Llewelyn:_ Thanks! I was going for both of those, so I'll consider that a very positive review. :-)

_J. Palmgren:_ Maybe the end was annoying because I find Dawn to be annoying. As for amazing plot devices-it's not mine to judge whether they're "amazing," but I have a few devices lying here around the apartment that I hope to share.

_mastigo & Guest:_ It's good to be back!

_Mr. Cardona:_ It's fun to be working on this again, but as for understanding all aspects of the tale: the WoT world is so complex that I'm guessing the authors themselves had/have a problem keeping it straight at times. Nevertheless, I'll hope to both get it as accurate as possible and make it as accessible as practicable.

**COMING SOON:** Chapter 11, "Across the Emptiness." Dawn is dutifully obedient to her sister's warning never to attempt to foray into the dreamworld again. The Slayers learn to dream peacefully and uneventfully.

Um, yeah. Right.


End file.
